


The Last Airbender

by chiiyo86



Series: FMA/At:LA fusion AU [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Alternate Universe - Avatar (TV) Fusion, Gen, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-21 13:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14285487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Now that he masters earthbending and firebending, Ed needs an airbender master. The problem is that during the Ishval civil war the government of Amestris, the Fire Nation, slaughtered all the airbenders. Well, all of them but one.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> And here is the third installment! I'm sorry this is taking me so long and I thank you for your patience. If you haven't read the first installments I recommend that you do, because I'm not sure how well this fic stands on its own.

“I see,” Roy Mustang said. A cloud covered the sun and the room suddenly got darker. “Well, this is actually good news.”

“Yeah, you know, I think I could have done without the interpersonal drama,” Edward Elric said. “It’s going to be super awkward.”

The boy punctuated his words with a half-grimace. He was sitting across Roy’s desk, his posture unusually rigid and serious, lacking his usual sprawl. The only other two people in the room were his brother, who sat next to him, and Lieuntenant Hawkeye. The lieutenant was behind her own desk but she’d stopped pretending that she was filling paperwork. Edward’s reveal that the serial killer Scar--the last airbender and unfortunately Edward’s only hope for a master--was the brother of one of his previous incarnations was a game-changing one. The fact that Roy and Hawkeye had witnessed that particular Avatar’s death, had watched his brother yell in grief and rage after the fact, wasn’t something to be dwelled on. 

“If awkwardness is our only problem with Scar, then I’ll consider us lucky,” Roy said. “Before your discovery, we had no leverage to use on Scar. He might not have wanted to help the Avatar. His brother, though…”

“I’m not his _brother_ ,” Edward said, shooting a surreptitious glance at Alphonse. “I’m only one person’s brother.”

Alphonse smiled. He’s listened to the conversation with remarkable calm, but then Edward had probably told him everything beforehand and he’d had time to react to the information in private. “That’s sweet, brother,” he said, “but Colonel Mustang is right--if you can tell Scar who you are, then at least it’ll make him hesitate about killing you.”

“Thank the spirits for small favors,” Edward mumbled. “Any luck finding him, by the way? I’ve waited long enough to start learning airbending.”

The fingers of his flesh hand were rattling on the knee of his automail leg, his whole body thrumming with nervous energy. Roy had always known Edward in a hurry--in a hurry to get back on his feet after the fire that had cost him his arm and leg and Alphonse’s sight, in a hurry to master firebending, in a hurry to find an airbender who could teach him. Edward’s goal--to master waterbending so he could heal the damage on Alphonse’s eyes--was only one element away, and in the past year or so Edward’s urgency had taken on a desperate edge. If they couldn’t make Scar cooperate, then Edward would lose his only chance. 

“Scar has so far managed to evade capture,” Roy said evenly. “But it’s only a matter of time before he strikes again, and then we’ll catch him. Don’t go anywhere without escort. You hear me, Elric?”

The boy flapped an unconcerned hand at him. “Yeah, yeah. Hearing you loud and clear, Colonel.”

The brothers left the office and Roy looked over at Hawkeye. “What are your thoughts on this new piece of information, lieutenant?”

“I agree with you that it might facilitate some things,” she said. “But it also might bring a whole other set of complications. Even if Scar cooperates, it’s going to be a very fraught relationship.”

“We don’t exactly have a choice.” 

“I know.” Hawkeye joined her hands on her desk, her posture perfectly poised and controlled. “What’s the plan, Colonel?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the plan once Edward has mastered all four elements? Finding an airbender master was always the main issue. Edward is a quick learner, you know that--if this Scar person can teach him, then the day when he’ll fully be the Avatar is almost at our doorstep.” She lowered her voice to an almost imperceptible level. “Do you mean to use Edward to overthrow the regime?”

Roy winced at the question. If it had come from anyone else, he might have gotten angry at the implication. But when he’d convinced Hawkeye to come back to the army, this was the job he’d given her: she was to be the guardian of his path. The hard questions were hers, as well as the bullet that would bring him down if he ever lost his way. He signaled her to come to him so they could have this conversation in whispers.

“You know this regime needs to end,” he murmured to her. “The path we’ve been treading since the last Fire Avatar is wrong, and if we keep going like we have we will plunge the world in chaos.”

“I know that,” she said. She stood in such a way that, if someone were to catch a glimpse of them from the window at Roy’s back, they would think that she was delivering a report. “But I’m not sure that the Avatar is meant to be used that way. Edward, for the moment, is entirely focused on healing Alphonse, but it’s not going to always be the case. One day he’s going to start thinking about his role, and he might not see things the same way you do.”

At the end of the Ishval conflict, the only thing that had kept Roy’s head out of the water was the obsessive idea that if he could climb to the top, he could change the course of their country’s fate. Was Hawkeye right--was he using Edward for the sake of his own ambition? Meeting the boy had changed his outlook on a lot of things, made him put his personal aspirations into perspective. He no longer thought that _he_ was the solution. 

“I’m not considering Edward like a tool, if that’s what you’re fearing,” he said slowly. “For the moment, what matters is that Edward be allowed to realize his full potential. Both the Air Avatar and the Water Avatar have been stopped from doing it, and I’m… I think this has weakened the Avatar, and that the current state of the world is directly related to that.”

Hawkeye glanced down at him. “Have you been reading airbender literature, Colonel? Because I doubt that my father’s teachings would have spawned those theories.”

“I may have,” Roy said, addressing her a wry smile. “Lieutenant, your concern isn’t misplaced. But I have a feeling that whatever we decide now, our best laid plans won’t matter much in the end. When Edward has full mastery of his powers and, hopefully, has managed to heal Alphonse, we’ll discuss with him what he should do. As you said, he’s bound to have opinions about it. In the meantime, we have to find and arrest a dangerous serial killer, and hope he isn’t too unstable to teach Edward.”

\---

“What about your escort, brother?” Al asked. “I think I remember very clearly that Colonel Mustang said ‘Don’t go anywhere without an escort, Elric.’”

Ed shot him an irritated look from over the book he held in front of him. The effect was lost on his blind brother, of course, but it made him feel better nonetheless.

“We’re in the library two blocks from HQ,” he said. “We’re well inside the military’s blue shadow. It’s fine.”

“I think you might just have jinxed us with those words,” Al said with a sigh. 

Ed rolled his eyes at him, another pointless move, and directed his attention back to the book he’d just taken from its shelf. He had read a little about airbender culture in his father’s vast library, which had unfortunately been lost in the fire that had destroyed their house--Ed’s first firebending feat--but if he was about to face Scar, convince the man to trust him, and learn airbending, then he figured he needed to know more. Being a firebender and a dog of the army gave Ed access to the restricted areas of their library in East City, but even then there wasn’t much on airbenders, and even less on their culture. The winners of the Ishval conflict had pretty much crushed the insubordinates into oblivion. Ed had managed to find some accounts of the war that described the airbender monks’ bending and fighting style, mostly in private journals, and that was what he’d been reading for the past half-hour. 

“Hey,” he said to Al after a long stretch of silent reading. “Now that’s interesting.”

Al tilted his head. “What is it?”

While Ed researched, Al had been reading too, albeit not with his eyes. He’d learned a tactile writing system that allowed him to read by brushing his fingers over series of bumps that represented letters. Ed didn’t know what book Al was reading right now, but he was almost sure Al had read it already; the library from the Harrington School for Blind Children, where Al borrowed his books, was pretty limited. Ed had tried talking to the school’s headmistress about what he could do to have more books made for his brother, but once she’d realized that he was with the army she’d refused to engage with him. Some books were probably better than no books at all, but it still didn’t feel right to Ed that his brother couldn’t join him in his research, so whenever he came across anything interesting he read it aloud to him.

“There’s a section about _chi_ blocking,” Ed said. “I always thought that this was a non-bender technique, but listen to this: ‘The airbender monks have the oddest defensive technique: they can hit the body in a series of quick jabs and the victim’s muscles are rendered useless. When they do it to firebenders, they’re temporarily unable to use their power. I had never seen this before, but Winston tells me that the monks include this technique in their training because it’s a way to disable their opponent without harming them. Maybe it was how it used to be, but each time I’ve seen it applied the helpless victim has been slaughtered right after.’ This is from the journal of Cadet Albert Ford.”

“Is it the first mention of this that you’ve found?” Al asked. 

“Yes, but there are a few other volumes that I’ve yet to get to. There’s so little left, though. It’s like the army has tried to make them disappear. Apparently it wasn’t enough that they’ve decimated the Ishval people and massacred all the airbenders but one.” 

His hands tightened on the small leather-bound volume as he felt the anger bubble inside him, making his lungs feel tight and his blood boil. He dropped the volume, almost startled by the intensity of the feeling. Indignation wasn’t a surprising thing to feel--what Amestris had done to Ishval was pretty shitty--but the anger had felt deeper than it had any right to be. More personal, somehow. 

“Brother?” Al said. “What’s wrong?”

Ed took a deep breath, trying to calm down. Of course Al would know he was getting upset--he always knew those things. 

“I was feeling angry,” he explained. “I know, I know, it’s nothing unusual--but it felt kind of… I don’t know. I was angrier than I should be? It’s weird.”

“Do you think that you might be feeling what Khalid feels?”

“Something like that. Or maybe not; Khalid seems like a pretty chill guy. Maybe it’s rather… What I would feel if I had Khalid’s background. If the Ishval people were _my_ people.”

 _Like Khalid and I were just one and the same._ Ed didn’t say that last part, but Al probably heard the implication anyway. This reincarnation stuff was a mind trip and neither of them really knew what to do with it. Edward was Khalid and Khalid was Edward--but also not. They were the Avatar. Ed looked over at his brother, whose fingers were nervously roaming over the polished wood of the table. None of the other Avatars had been Al’s big brother; that, at least, was his alone. 

“I’ll try to find more references to the _chi_ blocking used by the airbenders,” he said. “You know, if we could learn how it works, what specific points to hit, then it could be an interesting way of applying earbending. The jab could be done with a rock rather than with a finger and it would turn _chi_ blocking into a long-ranged technique. Maybe with waterbending too. Hey, do you think that the waterbending healing techniques are related to the _chi_ blocking ones?”

“I guess that both have to do with the way _chi_ flows in the body, so probably.”

That reminded Ed of something that their earthbending master, Izumi Curtis, had repeated often. “Everything that can be used to kill can be used to help,” he said out loud, exactly at the same time Al said it too. 

They looked at each other--or rather, Ed looked at Al and Al turned his face to him--and they both burst out laughing. Their hilarity took a full minute to subside. 

“I wonder how she’s doing,” Al said, suddenly wistful. “We haven’t visited her in a while.”

“Well, if we went to visit her then I’d have to tell her that I’ve joined the army. And then, she would simply kill me.”

“That’s true. But _I_ haven’t joined the army, so I’d probably be safe.”

“Al, you traitor, you wouldn’t let me suffer on my own, would you?”

They were shushed by an irritate librarian when they started making too much noise with their bickering. Ed went back to his research and found a few other mentions of _chi_ blocking being used by airbender monks, which proved that Cadet Ford hadn’t been talking shit. Hours flew by like nothing, and it was only when Ed’s stomach started to rumble loudly that he realized that it was way past lunch time. 

“Oh, shit,” he said, “We missed lunch at the mess hall. We’ll have to grab it somewhere else.”

Al frowned. “We shouldn’t wander around without an escort. Let’s go back to HQ.”

“Aww, Al, I’m dying here.”

“Dying from missing one meal?” Al huffed. “Not likely. But I guess you need food to grow up properly.”

“Hey!”

This time they got evicted from the library after Ed tried to grab his brother into a headlock. Once in the street, they continued to argue about how far they could reasonably go from HQ to find food. The early afternoon sun was mild, and the heavy grey clouds that gathered in the sky made Ed wonder whether it was going to rain. Probably, because his ports ached and changes in pressure tended to have that effect on them. He absentmindedly rubbed around them, not that it would do much good--the pain came from a lot deeper than surface skin.

Some rain would be a good thing, Ed thought, because they hadn’t had any in a while and he could feel it in the dried, packed earth under their feet. He just hoped that the rain would hold back until they were back to HQ because he wasn’t keen on getting soaked. Then a shadow that had nothing to do with the clouds fell over him and Ed looked up, tensing against a sudden feeling of alarm. 

A big man with brown skin and white hair loomed over him. His eyes were obscured by round sunglasses and two lines of white scar tissue crossed on his forehead. “Are you Edward Elric?” he asked in a deep, low voice.

“You’re--” Ed said, the dread inside him crystallizing into a solid ball of fear. 

Before he had time to finish his sentence, a violent gush of wind came at him. 

\---

The first indication that Al got that something was wrong was the sudden spike in his brother’s heartbeat. The man who stood next to Ed was huge, and when Al heard him ask after Edward Elric, his heart dropped into his stomach and his palms started to sweat. He felt the wind and heard his brother cry out when he hit a wall. Some bystanders exclaimed in surprise and fear, and Al thought dimly that if they could stall for a few more minutes Mustang would come to their rescue. As Ed had said, HQ was only a couple blocks away. 

“Wait,” he said. “Ed is--”

Scar--because who else could it be--whirled around to him. Ed had read to Al about airbending and its signature circle walking, and some analytical, curious part of himself took note of it in Scar’s steps. Ed’s readings had also said that airbending was mostly defensive and centered around evading and eluding the opponent, but then Scar sliced the space in front of himself and Al, too slow to recognize the attack for what it was, felt his shoulder erupt in pain.

“Leave him alone!” Ed’s voice sounded tight, but not too pained. “He’s not a firebender!”

 _Ed, you moron,_ Al thought when Scar directed his attention back to his brother. Al couldn’t earthbend, not in the middle of East City with plenty of people to witness it. Fortunately, Izumi Curtis had been of the mind that one shouldn’t rely too much on bending and had taught them to fight without it. Al used his white cane as a weapon and struck Scar behind the knees. There was a narrow alley right next to them and if they could lure him into it, out of sight of curious onlookers, then maybe they could use earthbending without risk.

Ed must have had the same thought, because after a rush of flames he dashed toward the alley. Scar followed him, seemingly disinterested in Al. The man was quick and nimble for his size, and obviously a very experienced fighter. Ed could barely do more than avoid the devastating power of his air blasts and slices, so Al plunged into the alley too, throwing his cane to the side. He spread his feet apart, closing his fist and drawing back his elbow to get a grip on the stone around them, but Scar managed to dodge the earthspike that he’d created. The man made a surprised sound at the sudden earthbending and spun around to face Al again. Al ducked to avoid the next air slice, but the maddening way Scar moved was unfamiliar and made it difficult to anticipate his attacks.

The air in the alleyway heated up from a fire blast. “Al!” 

Scar was in Al’s space before he could do more than blink. He felt a pressure at the juncture between his shoulder and neck, then at a few other points in quick succession. Suddenly, the world around him contracted itself and he couldn’t move. Unable to keep himself up, he flopped onto the cold hard ground like a dead fish, painfully hitting his chin in the process.

“Al!” his brother yelled again. “You _asshole!_ ”

“I’m fine, brother, this--this is just _chi_ blocking,” Al said with difficulty, his face pressed against the ground.

It wasn’t fine, though, because Al couldn’t move, couldn’t _see_. The permanent darkness around him had become desperately empty, and Al’s breath started coming out in short, panicked pants. He was helpless, truly _blind_ , and his brother was still fighting. The only sense Al could rely on was his hearing, and what it told him wasn’t good: he could hear the air rushing and whistling, and the grunts from the fighters, but he couldn’t feel any heat or any quiver from the earth, because Scar wasn’t giving Ed any time to firebend or earthbend. The sounds from Ed told Al that his brother was getting tired and frustrated, and then he heard metal clanking, something creaking. _Please, let it not be the automail_. No bender could bend with one arm. 

“Scar!” Al tried to shout. “Don’t do this! Ed is the Avatar! He’s the _Avatar!_ ”

But with the way his face was turned his cries were directed to the ground and Scar probably couldn’t hear him. He was likely entirely focused on his fight with Ed and had dismissed Al as unimportant. Al’s heart was hammering in his chest and his head was swimming. Even without his earthbending, he could follow the fight well enough to know that Ed couldn’t win. That huge, murderous airbender was going to kill Al’s brother while Al was sprawled on the ground like a useless slab of meat. 

_Al, I’m the Avatar._

_I will heal you, Al. I’m making you a promise, okay? One day, you will see again._

_Okay, Ed, I believe you. You’ll learn all four elements. You’ll be the greatest Avatar ever._

“Brother,” Al whimpered against the stone. “Brother, run away!”

Ed wasn’t running away, of course. He wouldn’t, not if it meant leaving Al behind, paralyzed and defenseless. But suddenly Al heard something that alarmed him even more than the fight’s sounds: his brother, choking, while the air made an awful sucking sound. When Mustang had described Basque Grand’s very public death, he had told them that Scar had formed a ball of air around the firebender’s head, vacuuming all the air out of his lungs. Al pictured the scene with Ed’s head inside the ball, Ed’s hands desperately clawing at his throat.

“No!” he shouted. 

Ed’s path as the Avatar had just started and Al wouldn’t believe that it could end like this, in a back alley, before he’d even mastered all the elements. He fought furiously against the paralysis, trying to raise his head from the ground. He managed to move it, but not by much. 

“Brother! _Brother!_ ”

\---

The sound of air rushing at his ears was deafening. _Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe._ His lungs hurt from the violence done to them as Scar tore all of his air out. His vision was blurred by tears. But he could feel the earth under himself, his consciousness having run there to escape the terrible agony Scar was inflicting on him. Down there it was cool, solid and quiet. 

_How can I die like this? I promised Al I would heal him!_

His left hand was clutching uselessly at his chest, because he couldn’t quite make his automail hand move, but he forced it down, curling his fingers against his palm into a fist. Without breath he couldn’t firebend at all, but the earth was still there at his command, all around him and under him. Scar, of course, didn’t know it was even a possibility. Ed pulled his hand upward, taking hold of the stone and pushing it at the airbender.

All of a sudden air rushed back into his lungs as painfully as it had been extracted. Ed’s knees buckled and he fell down on all four, gasping and coughing and still not fully convinced that he wasn’t going to die. His purpose had vaguely been to hit one of the points on Scar’s body that he’d seen him hit on Al, hoping to disturb his _chi_. When he looked up, though, his vision still very blurry, he saw that Scar seemed to be moving just fine, but that his attention was entirely on the spike of stone that Ed had created.

“What the spirits is this?” he growled. 

He turned to Al, but Al was still lying face down on the ground, unmoving. Even though Ed knew that the effects of _chi_ blocking were supposed to be temporary, it terrified him to see his brother like this.

“It was _me_ ,” Ed rasped, wearily hauling himself up to his feet. He ached so much, and from everywhere, that it was hard to tell if he was seriously injured. He tried to make his automail fingers move, and they did, but not as promptly as they should have. “Motherfucker. If you’d let me--would’ve explained--”

Ed blinked and his vision finally cleared, enabling him to see the look of utter shock on Scar’s face. He’d lost his sunglasses at some point and his eyes were just as red as Khalid’s, and looking at Ed like he was some sort of anomaly made flesh.

“You earthbent,” Scar said. “And you firebent. This is impossible.”

Ed coughed; his mouth tasted like copper and he had the remote thought that this probably wasn’t a good sign. “Are you dense--or what? Of course it’s possible. You of--of all people should know.”

“He’s the Avatar!” Al had managed to lift his head off the ground and his voice was shrill. “The _Avatar_ , and you were going to kill him!”

“No,” Scar said. His voice rumbled like an earthquake. “You belong to the army.”

“Didn’t have much choice, once my--firebending abilities manifested. Was an earthbender--first, though, just like my brother.”

Scar’s whole body was shaking, and on someone so big it looked like a natural disaster in the making. He threw his head from side-to-side in furious denial.

“It’s true,” Ed insisted. “I’m the Avatar, so that means I’m--”

“No.”

“--your brother’s reincarnation, and--”

“ _No_.”

Urgent voices echoed at the end of the alley and Ed could see blue-clad silhouettes advance toward them.

“Listen to me,” he whispered to Scar. “You have to let them arrest you. I promise you’ll be fine. I have an ally in the army. You’ll be fine, but I need an airbender master and you’re the only one left. Feisal, you have to trust me.”

Ed had hoped that using Scar’s real name would help, but it actually seemed to have the opposite effect. Scar’s features locked into a mask of fury and he roared, “Don’t speak that name!”

For a second, Ed thought that Scar was going to attack him again, but the man spun his hands and the air lifted him. He bounced against one wall, then against the opposite one, until he could jump to the roof. The soldiers fired at him but it didn’t look like they’d managed to hit him. Scar disappeared out of sight and the soldiers yelled at each other directions to go after him.

Ed ignored the commotion and staggered to his brother’s side. His lungs ached, each breath burning like fire, and the fingers of his right hand still didn’t respond the way they should, but those were all problems to worry about later, once he was sure that Al was okay. 

“Al.” He scooped his brother in his arms, wincing when it jostled some of his injuries. “Are you all right?”

Al was leaning against Ed with his whole weight, but his voice was free of pain when he answered. “Yeah, I just can’t move. You?”

“I’m fine.”

“He was--he was killing you.”

Ed’s lungs tightened at the memory and he started coughing dryly.

“Brother?”

Getting enough air to talk was hard, but Ed eventually managed to say, “He didn’t.”

“You should’ve run away.”

“And leave you behind?” Ed exclaimed, incensed at the thought. It triggered another coughing fit and he couldn’t get out the rant he wanted to have on the topic. 

“Edward? Alphonse?”

This was Lieutenant Hawkeye, and Ed was privately ashamed at how relieved he was to see her, even if the threat had passed. If Mustang had been there too, he may have launched into a complaint about how _late_ they were to the party, but he wasn’t sure he had enough breath for it and shouting at Hawkeye felt subtly wrong. 

“Are you two all right?” she asked, kneeling next to them. “Alphonse? What’s wrong with you?”

“ _Chi_ blocking,” Ed said shortly. He figured that since she’d served in Ishval, Hawkeye would know what he meant.

Indeed she nodded, looking relieved. “Then he’ll be all right. What about you, Edward?”

“I’m okay.” He stifled a cough. “You better go after Scar.”

“We’re handling it. The colonel wanted me to check on you.”

“Scar didn’t seem to be--in a cooperative mood,” Ed said, trying to convey with his eyes a little more than that.

Hawkeye’s expression darkened. “You’ll have to do your report to the colonel. But first, let’s get you two to a hospital.”

\---

Ed had hoped that their trip to the hospital would be a quick one, but he had no such luck. Half-an-hour after the fact, Al started to regain his motor functions, and he managed to communicate to Ed that his earthbending was back too. They both had various cuts and bruises that were easily treated, but the doctors worried about the damage to Ed’s lungs. Ed hadn’t stopped coughing since the fight and he felt short of breath even when he was at rest, but he’d rather hoped that it would just go away on its own. The doctors, who tended to be worst-case-scenario kind of people, wanted to keep him on observation. In the meantime they were treating him with oxygen, and it hadn’t taken long for Ed to develop an acute claustrophobic feeling from the face mask that delivered it.

“It’s just a little cough!” Ed raged, his voice distorted by the mask. Annoyingly, he had to pause then so he could cough. “I’ll recover just as well at home!”

“The barracks are hardly the ideal place to recover from anything, and if the doctors want to keep an eye on you then I tend to favor their opinion over yours,” Mustang said from his spot on the right of Ed’s bed. Al sat on his other side, not saying anything. “Now, your report, Elric.”

Ed’s status as a Major had granted him a private room and Hawkeye was guarding his door, so this was as safe as they were going to be. Ed narrated the fight in a few, terse sentences--there wasn’t much to say, and Ed wasn’t thrilled to relive how he’d totally fucked up his one chance at an airbender master. Could he try to learn waterbending without having learned airbending? Tradition said that the Avatar had to learn the elements in a certain order: Fire came after earth, and water came after air, the way summer came after spring and winter came after autumn. This was how the Avatars cycled too. But was it just ritual bullshit or was there a real reason to it? So much about the Avatar had been lost or was unavailable to him. 

“Realizing I’m the Avatar hasn’t made Scar rush to my side,” Ed said bitterly. 

“I never thought he would be so easy to convince,” Mustang said, although he was frowning. His frown deepened further when he added, “What I want to know, is what you were doing out in the street without your escort.”

Ed’s eyelid twitched. “I was just going to the library,” he mumbled, looking down to his mismatched hands on the white hospital sheet.

He braced himself for a lecture both from Mustang and his brother, but Al still wasn’t speaking--his hands gripped his cane tightly and his face betrayed nothing. As for Mustang, he only heaved a put-upon sigh. 

“I’m going to assign someone to your protection. You’ll have a lot of trouble shaking off that particular escort,” Mustang said mysteriously. “You’ll stay here until your mechanics arrive. Have you called her yet?”

“Not yet.” Now was another conversation that Ed didn’t look forward to. Winry was going to _murder_ him. 

“See that you do it quickly. I’ll let keep you updated on our progress looking for Scar.”

Mustang and Hawkeye left, but not without putting some soldiers to guard Ed’s door. One of them was Havoc and he laughed at Ed’s grumpy face.

“Looking rough, chief,” he said, chewing on the end of an unlit cigarette. “I heard that you got your ass kicked by that serial killer.”

Ed scowled until the man retreated to the hallway. Left alone with Al, Ed glanced at his little brother’s stoic face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. 

“Nothing’s wrong,” Al answered, a little more snappish than was usual.

“Come on, I know you better than that. Are you mad at me because I ditched my escort? I’m sorry. It was stupid of me.”

“I’m not--It’s not that.”

“Are you still feeling side effects from the _chi_ blocking?”

“No.” As a demonstration, Al lifted a hand and flexed his fingers. “I feel fine.”

“Hmm.”

Ed wanted to say more, but when he opened his mouth and let air in to speak, he started coughing instead. Then he fell back against his pillows, feeling more drained than he had any right to be after such a short fight, like his bones had been turned into water. Al would speak when he was ready. Most people saw him as the kind, quiet one, but in truth he had a temper too, although it was less obvious and harder to rile than Ed’s. 

“Gah, I guess I have to call Winry now.” Ed irritably fiddled with the elastic strap that held his oxygen mask in place. His lungs itched with the urge to cough again. “What a pain.”

“We haven’t seen her in a long time,” Al said quietly.

Ed looked at him, at the unhappy pull of his mouth, and felt a sharp stab of guilt. Nothing forced Al to stay in East City; he wasn’t part of the military, after all, and was free to go where he pleased. It was even dangerous for him to be too close to the authorities in case someone discovered his earthbending abilities. Resembool was a backwater place that only saw a soldier once in a blue moon; he would be a lot safer there. But Ed knew from experience that if he said that to his brother, all it would do was to make him angry. 

“I’m sure she’s just the same as ever,” he said. “Bossy and an automail nerd.” His words had the merit of making Al smile faintly, so he complained louder, “I can hear her already, ‘What did you do to my precious automail? How could you be so careless!’ Well, I’m sorry, but when a mad airbender attacks me I have to defend myself!”

“I’ll be good to see her,” Al said.

Ed sighed and looked out the window at the cloudy sky. “Yeah,” he said softly.

\---

As Roy had expected, the news of Scar’s attack on Edward Elric had a few members of Central’s Investigations Office come to East City wagging their tails. What Edward didn’t realize in his frustration at how his confrontation with Scar had gone, was that he was the first person to have fought the man and survived. That, in itself, was remarkable, but also attention that Edward didn’t need. Among the investigators was Roy’s old friend Maes Hughes, and Roy already knew that he would be discussing the event at length with him over dinner. He would probably have to reveal the truth about Edward to Maes, but he’d always known that this day would come and he was sure that Maes had an inkling about it anyway. But right now, Roy had another target in mind. 

He was able to spot the towering silhouette of Major Armstrong from afar. The man was hard to miss with his gigantic stature and his gleaming bald skull that sported a single loop of blond hair.

“Major Armstrong,” Roy said once he was within speaking distance. He schooled his features into an expression of bland pleasure at having come across an acquaintance. “It has been a while.”

“Colonel Mustang!” Armstrong said in his thundering voice. “I has been too long indeed.”

“Would you mind walking with me?” Roy said. He drummed his fingers on the stack of documents he carried against his chest. “I have to get these signed, and it would give us time to catch up.”

His size and his bubbling personality might make most people dismiss him, but Roy knew that Armstrong was a sharp man. The blue eyes only narrowed a little before he said genially, “What a good idea!”

They chitchatted about nothing of consequence until they were crossing the vast courtyard that would lead them to the Treasury building. Then, keeping his expression relaxed and unconcerned for the benefit of whoever might be looking at them, Roy said, “Have you had the time to read the report on Edward Elric’s fight with Scar?”

“Yes. That boy was extremely lucky.”

“It wasn’t just luck, although I agree that Elric tends to have extraordinary luck. I guess you could say that he has been blessed by the spirits. Born on an auspicious day, you see.”

Roy quickly glanced to Armstrong, just to check whether his words had landed right. Major Armstrong took a sharp breath. “Surely you don’t mean--”

“I mean exactly that, Major,” Roy said, staring straight ahead. In a low voice, he quickly narrated to Armstrong the circumstances that had surrounded his first meeting with the Elrics. “This all happened four years ago.”

“Those poor boys,” Armstrong said tremulously, and Roy knew from experience that the compassion in his voice wasn’t faked. “They’re so young and they’ve already known so much tragedy.”

“Edward’s life is unlikely to get any easier, and neither is Alphonse’s if he persists in binding his fate to his brother’s. Anyway, you will understand that I’m greatly interested in Scar: he’s Edward’s only chance at an airbending master. For the moment, only myself, Lieutenant Hawkeye and you know about Edward. I’m planning to tell Lieutenant Colonel Hughes too, because if we manage to find Scar we’ll need access to him so he can teach Edward--that is, if we can obtain his willing cooperation.” Roy smiled wryly. “At this point it’s very tempting to force his hand, but I’m afraid that this would go against the spirit of the whole enterprise.”

“I’m afraid it would.”

“Major, I’m sure you know why I took the risk to share with you this very sensitive piece of information.”

Armstrong stopped in his tracks in the middle of the courtyard. “Colonel, this would be an honor,” he said solemnly. 

Roy couldn’t help but breathe a small sigh of relief. He wouldn’t have taken the risk of telling Armstrong the truth if he hadn’t been sure of his reaction, but it was good to have one less thing to worry about. Counting the seconds in his head--one moment too long, and if someone had been observing them they would wonder about the topic of their conversation--Roy replied in the same tone, “No, Major, the honor is mine.” Then he resumed walking.

“There’s still time before my help is needed, though,” Armstrong said. “Why tell me this now?”

“Ah, Major, this is because in the meantime I have an assignment for you: you will serve as the Elrics’ new escort until we’ve managed to catch Scar. Don’t tell Edward that you know who he is for now. Your job will just be to make sure that he doesn’t wander off by himself again.”

Armstrong responded with ready enthusiasm, and Roy allowed himself to picture the major handling Edward for his own private amusement. That little brat had always been careless with his safety and was probably the reason for each white hair on Roy’s head, but he was going to pay for it now. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that first meeting!

\---

Ed’s phone call to Winry had gone just as well as he’d expected, and it had put him in a foul mood. The oxygen therapy was over and he was now free to pace the length of his room even though the doctors had told him he should rest, but for once Al didn’t feel like bullying his brother into behaving. Since the fight he’d been feeling strangely numb, all his emotions muted and colorless. He should have been sick with worry about the doctors’ pronouncement that Scar had damaged Ed’s lungs, but instead all he could think was, _Breathing is fundamental to firebending. Maybe it would be better if he couldn’t firebend anymore._

Ed couldn’t be the Avatar if he didn’t couldn’t bend all the elements. If he couldn’t firebend, maybe he would get discharged from the army. They could go back to Resembool and--Al shook his head, trying to clear the fog that addled his thoughts and feelings. Ed becoming the Avatar was something he’d put his faith in years ago; it would be a tragedy if everything they’d been through amounted to nothing in the end. But the sounds of Ed’s fight with Scar while Al lay there uselessly wouldn’t leave him alone. They kept playing in his head, again and again, like a broken record. It felt like he couldn’t worry about Ed’s health or about anything else in the present because his mind was stuck listening to his brother dying. 

“Hey, Al! Are you listening to me?”

Ed sounded annoyed enough that he must have been calling for a while. Al sighed, forcing himself to pay attention to his surroundings. They were alone in the room, although there were still guards at the door. Ed had stopped his pacing and was standing close. 

“What is it, brother?” Al said wearily. 

“Seriously, what’s wrong with you? I tried giving you some space, but you’re acting really weird and I’m getting worried. Did you get hurt somewhere and not tell me?”

“No, Ed, that’s _your_ thing,” Al said a little more harshly than he’d intended. “And didn’t the doctors tell you that you should be resting?”

“Okay, now you’re sounding a little more like yourself,” Ed said instead of retaliating with a biting retort of his own. He actually sat down on the edge of his bed, maybe as a compromise, or because he was getting a little out of breath. “What’s on your mind, really? Talk to me.”

Talking to Ed wasn’t the problem; they’d been each other’s main interlocutor for their whole lives. No, the problem was to put into words what troubled him. He wasn’t sure what to say. Was it just that he’d been so scared that Ed would be killed that he couldn’t think past it? Was it the memory of his total helplessness that wouldn’t leave him alone?

What came out was, “Are you still going to learn airbending from Scar?” 

“I… guess so. I mean, if they can catch him, and if I can convince him to help me. I was thinking of asking Khalid for help, but I’ve never had to try to talk to him before, he’s always talked to me first, so--”

“But he tried to kill you!”

“Scar? No shit he did! But I don’t have exactly a ton of other potential teachers lining up.”

“But--but--”

“But what?”

“What if you didn’t learn airbending?” Al’s fists were closed so tightly that he could feel his nails digging into his palms. “I mean, I know that the Avatar has to learn all the elements, but wouldn’t three elements be enough? That’s already two more than anyone else can!”

“Oh, Al.” Ed walked up to him and rested a hand on his shoulder; Al realized then that he was shaking, his breathing stuttering in his chest in an uncontrolled way. “I know I’ve made you wait for too long. I promise you, if we don’t find Scar quickly then I’ll start looking around for a waterbending teacher, and--”

“What? It’s not what this is about!” Al felt angry now, and he was grateful for a feeling that stood out in the murkiness he was bogged down in since yesterday. He shoved at Ed’s hand, making him let go. “Stupid brother! I don’t care about my eyes if you get yourself killed!”

“Al--"

Ed didn’t have the time to say more, because someone knocked on the door and entered.

“Ed? Al? Am I coming at the wrong moment? I heard shouting.”

“Ah, Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, come in,” Al said, ashamed that he’d been heard and relieved that his conversation with his brother was cut short. “It was nothing. Ed and I were just talking.”

“Don’t you have enough work to keep you busy in Central?” Ed said. 

“Oh, but I’m here on official business! That incident with Scar.” Al’s stomach twisted at the mention. “I wanted to check on you boys.”

“We’re fine,” Ed said, and coughed.

“Roy told me Scar did some damage to your lungs,” Hughes said sympathetically. “I know that being stuck at the hospital is a pain, so I thought that it would do you two good to hear about my darling Elicia!” 

Hughes tended to shower people with photos of his daughter but with them he stuck to cute anecdotes, probably mindful of Al’s blindness. They learned all about the preparations for Elicia’s third birthday party, about the new words Elicia had learned--‘She’s so smart!’--, and about her recent fancy for orange food. Despite Ed’s grumbling, Al found the rush of words soothing. There wasn’t much Hughes expected them to do but nod and exclaim at the right places. Also, Elicia did sound adorable and Al hoped he would be able to see her one day. _But not if it costs you your life, brother. Some things are more important to me than getting my sight back._

“I hope I’ll be back in time for Elicia’s birthday!” Hughes said. “With Scar on the run and the riot in Lior--”

“ _What?_ ” 

Ed started coughing and wouldn’t stop. He folded himself in two and was forced to sit back on the bed, with Hughes unhelpfully patting him on the back. Al got up and poured his brother a glass of water that Ed grabbed eagerly. While he tried to get his cough under control, Al asked the question that was probably on his mind, “What do you mean, a riot in Lior? When we left, my brother had exposed the fake Avatar Cornello. It looked like the people of Lior had it under control.”

Hughes’ voice was serious when he answered, “I see, Roy hasn’t told you. I apologize, Ed, I should have taken your health into account.”

“Just tell me--now,” Ed said, his voice rough from coughing. “Said--too much already.”

“After you exposed Cornello, things were quiet in Lior for a while. But Cornello came back and managed to convince some people that you’d fooled them, Ed, and that he really was the Avatar. Soon enough the people supporting Cornello as the Avatar and the people who didn’t were at each other’s throat. The army had to intervene and is now in control of the city.”

“Did a lot of people die?” Al asked hollowly. 

“It’s under control, now, but--yes. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t get it,” Ed mumbled. “He was pretty thoroughly humiliated. I thought he’d run away. Why did he come back?” He drank another sip of water. “Was he arrested?”

“No, he slipped through our fingers,” Hughes said. “Some of his supporters must have helped him escape.”

“Do you think he’s going to come after Ed?” Al asked, cold fear gripping his heart.

“I don’t know. It’s a possibility. But with your new escort, I’m not too worried about you.”

“Who’s my new escort?” Ed asked, his voice laced with suspicion. “Mustang said something weird about it and I don’t trust the bastard as far as I can throw him.”

“He should be here soon.” Someone knocked on the door right at that moment. “Oh, look at that. Perfect timing. Come in, Major Armstrong!”

Al focused on the new comer and his mind boggled at how big the man was. He was so big that he had to bow his head to enter and his shoulders barely fit in the doorway. He must have been even bigger than Sig, their master’s husband. 

“What the spirits--” Ed croaked.

“Edward Elric!” a voice boomed. Ed made an unarticulated squeaky sound. “What an honor to meet you! My name is Alex Lous Armstrong, from the illustrious Armstrong family!”

The man lunged forward and Ed scrambled off the bed, falling into a firebending defensive stance. Al stepped between him and the major to prevent a disaster from happening. Colonel Mustang would be extremely annoyed if Ed fried his new escort. 

“Wait, brother! I’m sure that the major didn’t mean to--”

“Alphonse Elric!” Al startled at the sudden call of his name. “It’s a pleasure to meet you too! Such a faithful brother!”

Before Al had the time to brace himself, he felt solid arms the size of his legs wrap around him and squeeze him against a massive chest. All the breath was forced out of his lungs and Al’s ribs screamed in protest.

“Hey, leave my brother alone!”

Major Armstrong released Al and Al gratefully breathed gulps of fresh air, dimly wondering if this was how his brother had felt when Scar had stolen the air from his lungs. Hughes’ visit had managed to make him not think about it for a good ten minutes, but now the sounds of Ed’s choking were back, playing in a loop in his mind. 

“Al, are you okay?” Ed’s warm flesh hand pressed against the nape of his neck and Al leaned into it. _He’s alive, he’s alive, and I will_ not _let this happen again_.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Hughes,” Ed said, “tell me this crazy guy isn’t the escort that Mustang assigned me.”

“I can already tell that this is going to go great!” Hughes said cheerfully. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to you leave you to it. I have to track down Roy.”

Hughes left like a gust of wind, cackling madly about something. Armstrong didn’t seem in the least offended by Ed’s rudeness, but he also wisely didn’t try to hug him again. Al let himself relax a little; the various visits had helped him shake off some of his numbness, and he felt a renewed motivation to watch his brother’s back. He only needed to get stronger and not let Scar get past his guard again. 

\---

He retreated to the sewers and lived there like a rat for several days. It wasn’t the first time that he’d used the underground as a refuge, and he’d come to find a certain measure of comfort in it. His native land was all open spaces, sun and warm air, but it was out of his reach. He wasn’t worthy of this spirits-blessed place anymore, and it was fitting that he found himself roaming dark stinky tunnels. His realm was darkness, now. 

The Avatar. _He’s the Avatar and you were going to kill him!_ Bent on survival and on escaping the army, Scar had managed not to think about the two golden-haired boys for a few days. They didn’t look Xingese, and yet the one that was in the army, Edward Elric, had said that they were earthbenders. The inconsistency should have made Scar dismiss his claims, but earthbending had definitely happened during that fight. Maybe it had been the other boy, even though Scar knew that his mastery of _chi_ blocking was precise and that the boy shouldn’t have been able to do any bending yet. Still, this was more likely than the alternative. Edward had said that the other one was his brother, but maybe the boys were of mixed descent. It would explain why they didn’t look Xingese.

But every time Scar came to that point in his reasoning, comforted by how much sense it made, the boy’s voice echoed in his mind: _‘Feisal, you have to trust me’._ How could he have known his name? The name that he’d forsaken, not even using it in the privacy of his own mind? He hadn’t told the soldiers his name when he’d been a prisoner after his brother’s death. He knew that the army had nicknamed him ‘Scar’ because they ignored his true identity. But that boy, that fierce yellow-eyed boy who had somehow managed to firebend and earthbend, knew how he used to be called. That, and _more._

_You of all people should know._

_I’m the Avatar, so that means that--_

A scraping sound forced him to break this trail of thoughts, putting him immediately on alert. He was more than familiar with the scuttling of rats in the sewers, and this had come from a much larger being. Then he heard footsteps, from one, no, two people. They didn’t sound hurried and there were no voices, so they probably weren’t the soldiers who were after him. He wasn’t the only one who used those tunnels as a hiding place, and the etiquette for such encounters was generally to amiably ignore each other. Still, it always paid to be careful, so Scar bent at the knees and raised his arms in preparation. 

There was no light in the tunnel and Scar had gotten used to relying only on his hearing, so he was startled when he heard a scratching sound and then a sudden flame broke the darkness. His first, instinctive thought when he saw the flame was, ‘ _a firebender!_ ’ but it didn’t take even a second for him to realize that someone had simply scratched a match. 

The hand holding the match was slim and black, as if the person was wearing long gloves. The little flame was raised to a smiling face; it was a woman, with painted red lips and dark, piercing eyes. Her pale face stood out against the darkness at her back, but the rest of her body was lost to it, a part of the shadows. 

“Ah, there he is,” she said in a low, sultry voice. “The man who almost killed the Avatar. Tsk, tsk, how rash. It’s _much_ too early for this.”

There was movement behind her and Scar got of a shadowy glimpse of her companion: they were a lot smaller, but also a lot larger, and Scar could see two beady eyes gleam with the light of the match. Who were those people? If they weren’t with the army, why where they after him?

“Lust,” said a horribly strident voice. “Oh, Lust, can I eat him?”

“Of course, Gluttony,” the woman named Lust said. “We want no traces of him left.”

Gluttony squealed excitedly like an awful murderous child, then jumped into the river of used water from the city, splashing it all around him. The flame from the match got extinguished and it was once again pitch black inside the tunnel. The flip-flop of the water was all Scar could hear for a moment. 

And then, “Come here, come here and let me eat you!”

The darkness wasn’t the worse problem, because Gluttony was large and Scar could feel the air shift as he moved, which gave him enough warning to avoid his first strikes. But the ledge on which Scar was standing was too narrow for the airbending’s circle walking and wide movements. His bending was made for wide spaces, while he didn’t know a thing about his adversary’s style of fighting. 

Except for a few enthusiastic splashes, Gluttony made no particular use of the water. _Not a waterbender, then. Clearly not a firebender either, or even an earthbender._ But Scar couldn’t recognize any known fighting style either. Gluttony was wild and unpredictable, but also faster than he looked. One of his fists narrowly missed Scar and crashed against the wall; from the sound of it, he’d managed to damage the wall while not hurting himself at all. Only Scar’s reflexes allowed him to keep up and evade his opponent’s attacks, but he hadn’t succeeded in completing one single attack himself. Frustrated by how little space he had to move, he decided to jump into the water.

It reached him mid-thigh, cold and slimy, and would make moving a lot harder. If only he could somehow use it…

“Stop jumping around!” Gluttony complained. “Lust, make him stop!”

“You have to learn how to do things on your own, Gluttony,” Lust said. She didn’t sound like she’d moved from her initial spot. 

More splashing water as Gluttony joined him in the river, and Scar only had seconds to think of his next move. He crouched low and then spun his hands, sucking the water into the funnel of air he was creating. The water shot out at the other end right when Gluttony came at him.

“Puah! How mean!”

Scar didn’t waste time darting away, but to escape Gluttony he had to pass Lust, who hadn’t done much so far to help her partner. As he rushed past her, he heard the smooth silk of her voice as a whisper to his ear, “Oh, no, you don’t, mister airbender.”

Something hit his shoulder and the pain bloomed like a flower. Did she have a sword? Had she thrown something at him? He waved a hand in front of him to grab what was planted in his shoulder; it wasn’t metal, wasn’t even sharp, and Scar couldn’t find a handle even when extending his arm as far as he could reach. Lust chuckled, and Scar felt a yank when whatever had stabbed his shoulder got pulled out. Warm blood trickled down his arm but Scar ignored it, and to keep Lust away he swiped the air in front of him. Then he did another, vertical swipe, aiming at the ceiling. Stones rained over them but Scar had expected it, and he managed to jump out of the way and avoid most of it. After another swipe, the ceiling crumbled. If the spirits were kind, his opponents would be buried under the fallen ceiling, but Scar didn’t pause to check how they were doing. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder, drenched in water so foul that it numbed his sense of smell, he ran as fast as he could into the maze of tunnels. 

The best thing for him then was to get out of the sewers, because it was no place to be when you had an open wound. But a man his size walking around with blood on his clothes would draw unwanted attention, so he pushed to the outskirts of the city before he came out to the surface. The glare from the sun blinded him but being able to breathe and feel an air that wasn’t fetid was a blessing. His sleeve was now soaked in blood and he was getting dizzy, so he walked doggedly until the buildings around him became few and far between. 

He caught the smell of food in the air and looked around, gripping his wounded shoulder in a futile attempt to staunch the blood. He’d never come that far east of the city, and his attention was drawn to a cluster of haphazardly-built huts of wooden planks, metal sheets and burlap. People walked around or sat at the huts’ entrances, sometimes stirring large pots that must be the source of the smells. Everyone’s skin was as brown as Scar’s and the scents were as familiar and jealously guarded in the secret of his heart as his own name was. He was standing at the periphery of an Ishvalan slum, and as soon as he realized this he turned on his heels. He wasn’t worthy of the sacred place of his ancestors and neither was he worthy of his people. He had failed to protect them. 

His intention had been to walk away, but his body had a different idea. When he turned around, the world tilted on its axis and the ground shifted under his feet. Suddenly he was looking at the sky, white-grey and so unlike the powdery blue of his youth. Darkness ate away at the edges of his vision field, and then swallowed him whole.


	2. Chapter 2

He was used to waking up quickly, instantly aware of where he was and what was around him. This time he woke up in stages: first, he realized that he was lying down on his back. He was on a hard surface, but something soft supported his head. Then, his nose was hit by the familiar scents of home, and for a moment he thought, ‘ _Oh. This was all a dream, then. What a terrible nightmare._ ’ But the dull throb of pain in his shoulder jolted his more recent memories, and he remembered the sewers and the two strange people who had tried to kill him down there. That last thought, and the notion that they were probably not dead and would be coming for him, made him sit up in a shot before he was even fully conscious. Something fell from his face down on his lap, and when he opened his eyes he saw a folded piece of damp cloth that must have been on his forehead. 

Pain shot in his shoulder and he groaned low in his throat. Maybe drawn by the sound, someone pushed the flapping piece of burlap that served as a door and entered the hut, daylight pouring in along with them. It was a young boy of about ten, much too young to have ever known Ishval. He was round-faced and when he grinned, Scar could see the gap from a missing tooth. 

“Hey, thank the spirits, you’re awake,” the boy said. “How’s the shoulder?”

“Fine,” Scar said cautiously. 

“Awesome. Do you remember what happened to you? We found you right outside of camp, completely out cold.” The boy laughed. “You smelled like you’d taken a dip in the sewers!”

This wasn’t inaccurate, but Scar said nothing. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful to those people who had taken care of him, but everything in him itched to stand up and be gone. 

“Hey, grandpa!” the boy yelled in direction of the entrance. “He’s awake!”

The kid dropped down at Scar’s side, sitting cross-legged. An old man with a white, pointy beard came in and kneeled on Scar’s other side. He reached out and Scar instinctively jerked away.

Instead of getting offended, the old man smiled. “Now, now, no need to get jumpy. I merely want to take a look at your shoulder.”

Scar hadn’t realized until now that he was naked down to the waist and that his shoulder had been bandaged. The old man unraveled the bandage with warm dry hands, then examined the wound and poked at it, humming thoughtfully as he did. 

“Rick, my boy,” he finally said. “Go get me clean water and clean bandages. And some stew for our guest, who must be famished.”

Rick jumped to his feet, looking excited at being given a task. Once he’d left the old man turned to Scar, smiling again but with a rueful tilt to it.

“My name is Amal,” the old man told him. Scar’s voice got caught in his throat when he tried to reply something, but the old man raised a hand. “You don’t have to tell me yours. I think I know who you are. Soldiers have come to the camp, looking for an Ishvalan who’s been killing firebenders. An airbender, they said. I told them that all the airbenders were dead.” Scar tensed, but the old man chuckled and said, “Don’t worry, I have no intention to report you. No one here will report you.”

“Thank you,” Scar said stiffly. “I’ll be out of here immediately.”

“Stay at least until I’ve changed your bandages and you have eaten something. If you keel over again, the next people who pick you up might be of a different mindset.”

Scar nodded, but he had to look away from Amal’s knowing eyes. It felt like the old man had more to say, but he let the silence stretch for a little longer. 

“You _are_ an airbender, aren’t you?” Amal finally said. 

“How do you know?”

“I wouldn’t be able to tell, of course, if not for the look in your eyes when I said the word ‘airbender.’ And here I always thought that none of them had survived.”

“None of them did,” Scar said bitterly. “I am but a ghost of what they were.”

“Well, serial murder certainly wasn’t part of their beliefs as far as I recall.” Scar’s back went up at those words, but the old man sounded good-naturedly teasing. “Now, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be joking about those things, but at my age I have come to realize that laughter helps bear the harsh reality.”

“I have found that what helped me bear reality was to make the ones responsible pay for their deeds.”

“You will never be able to kill all of them. And what, then? When they arrest and execute you, who will be left to educate the new airbender children?”

“What?”

“You didn’t believe that no one would be born with the gift anymore, did you? There are none here, but I’ve heard of airbenders being born in various slums. Only they don’t know what to do with their power, not to mention that they have to hide it from the authorities, which is harder to do without control. You’re the only one who can teach them.”

Scar’s mind flashed to the bittersweet memories of his training as an airbender with his brother and the rest of their brethen. He remembered going through forms together, dozens of them moving and breathing to the same rhythm. He remembered them playing games with each other, balancing precariously on air scooters. Those memories were precious relics that he didn’t dare touch lest he sullied them with his anger and hatred. Thinking of reviving them felt like a sacrilege. 

“I can’t--” he started to say when alarmed voices rang out.

Rick stormed into the hut. “The army’s here! I think they’re looking for--”

There was no need for him to finish his sentence. “Someone has been talking,” Amal said darkly. “I can’t believe one of our people would do this.”

“It must be that guy Yoki!” Rick said hotly.

“Who is that?”

“He’s not Ishvalan,” said Amal, “but he’s a man who has fallen on hard times and has joined us a few months ago. I don’t know much about him--we don’t ask questions, you see. But what’s important is to find a way to get you out of here unnoticed. Rick, give me the bandages you brought.”

Amal dressed Scar’s wound with quick, efficient gestures. There were more cries outside, fear and anger from the slum’s inhabitants, and the barking of soldiers. They were going to search the camp until they found him, and they would punish those who’d helped him. 

“I’ll surrender,” he said.

“What? No!” Rick exclaimed. 

“They will execute you,” Amal said urgently, one of his hands gripping Scar’s forearm. “Once you’re dead, the airbenders die with you. Don’t worry about us; we have survived worse.”

“I can’t teach the airbender children,” Scar said. “But I can make sure that no one gets hurt because of me. I’ve made my mind.”

He shoved the old man’s off of him and exited the hut. Once he was outside, tall and conspicuous, he was surrounded by Amestrian soldiers in no time. They yelled at him, pointing their guns, and Scar raised his hands slowly, fighting the urge to choke every one of them to death. If he fought them in the middle of the slum, people-- _his_ people--were bound to get hurt. 

_Brother, I may finally be joining you._

\---

Winry wanted to kill Ed. This wasn’t an unusual state of mind for her, but unfortunately he was already in the hospital and she wouldn’t hit him when he was already wounded, no matter how much she wanted to. The fact that he was in the hospital was actually part of why she was so mad at him. Why couldn’t he have told her about it when he called her? Instead she had to hear the news from the giant man who had picked her up at the train station.

When she’d finally seen him, her first thought was that he didn’t look so bad. He was moving easily and didn’t look to be in any pain. But then Al had told her about the damage to his lungs, and Winry had felt her stomach contract with unease. Broken bones and cut-off limbs were one thing; she knew how to deal with those. Anything that affected the vital organs made her feel sick with fear. She didn’t want to show it to Ed so she acted irritated with him, and it was a relief when he responded in kind. Working on his automail helped too; it was nice to use her hands on a problem that she could solve. 

“One of the wires is damaged. How did that happen? It looks like you tried to slice it.”

“I didn’t _try_ to do anything! I was attacked, okay-- _attacked_. It must have been one of that airbender’s air slices. Let me tell you that all those stories about airbending being defensive and peaceful are full of shit.”

His tirade was punctuated by a short dry cough and Winry’s grip on her screwdriver tightened. She hated that sound. Ed was lying on his stomach on the hospital bed, his chin propped up on his flesh arm while he extended his automail one for her to examine.

“Stop whining,” she said, trying to sound light. “I have to replace it, but it’s going to take a little while.”

“I figured,” Ed said with a sigh. “Fine, let’s get this over with.”

“Hey, _this_ is what allows you to function, so have a little respect, okay?”

“Yeah. I know. Sorry, Winry.”

Ed sounded subdued and Winry didn’t know how to react to that kind of tone from him, so she said nothing and got to work. The automail’s metal was banged and scratched all over, to the point that Winry wondered what on earth he was doing with it. He was working for the military, but surely he wasn’t fighting for his life every day, was he? Not at fifteen. Those were not questions Ed was willing to answer, so Winry pushed them down and worked in silence for a little while. Al had left to get himself food, but she would have thought he would come back immediately. When he didn’t, Winry hazarded a question about it.

“Is there something wrong with Al?” she asked. “Did you guys have a fight?”

“No, not really. At least I don’t think so. He’s doing better, actually. Yesterday, he would barely talk to me. I think he’s shaken from the fight. Scar--the airbender we fought--did something to him that temporarily paralyzed him and stopped his earthbending. So he had to listen to--he could only listened to the fight and couldn’t move or use his earthbending to see. It must have sucked.”

Winry was sure that being in Al’s shoes during that fight had been a little worse than that. She also thought that there was something Ed wasn’t telling him about their encounter with the airbender. He hadn’t been very clear on how he’d come to damage his lungs, for one. But there was something else that she knew, and it was the significance of Ed meeting an airbender when they were supposed to have been all exterminated. 

“Ed,” she said, her voice very low. There were things that you couldn’t talk about too loudly. “The airbender you fought. You’re not trying to--get him as a master, are you?”

Ed’s shoulders shook with an explosive sigh. His naked back was riddled with the scars of the burns he’d received years ago in the fire he’d created. The sight was a familiar one, but it had been a long time since Winry had seen the scars and it made her heart hurt. 

“I don’t have a _choice_ ,” Ed said, and at the tone of his voice Winry knew that he’d had that discussion with someone else, probably with Al. “There’s literally no one else who could teach me!”

“But what if--”

Ed shot her a glare from over his metal shoulder. “Don’t say it, okay? I’ve started on this path and I will not give up halfway.”

Winry pinched her lips, then huffed. “It’s not as if you’d listen to me anyway!”

She was almost finished with Ed’s arm when Al came back. He had no food in his hands, so she guessed that he must have eaten it elsewhere. Not that she could blame him--getting stuck with Ed in a hospital room was no fun, she knew from experience. It was perfectly normal for Al to need some time on his own. 

“Hey, Al,” Winry said. “I’m almost done.”

Al smiled at her and sat down on the other side of the bed, propping the white cane that Winry knew he didn’t need against the wall. She’d never been able to really understand what his perception through earthbending was like, except that it was probably wildly different from actual sight. Did he know what Ed’s scars looked like? Was he able to tell how Ed or Winry or himself had changed with the years?

The doctors came to pick up Ed for more tests just as Winry was finishing up and he followed them grudgingly with a string of grumbles and curses. Left alone with Al, Winry asked him, “How bad was that fight, really?”

“Very bad,” Al said with a quiver to his voice. “But he’s alive. We both are. Now we have to work from there.”

There was a determination to Al’s words that Winry knew all too well. This was something that Ed and Al shared--for all of their obvious differences, the brothers were actually quite the same, deep down.

“What do you want to do?”

“If the army manages to catch Scar, I’ll--ask him to teach me.”

Winry’s eyebrows shot to her hairline. “Teach you? But he’s an airbender, isn’t he? What could he teach you?”

“His _chi_ blocking techniques.”

“Is this what he used to paralyze you? Ed told me about it,” she explained.

“Yeah, that’s what he used on me. I want to understand how it works and I want to know how to use it. I’m not the Avatar--I can’t learn how to bend the other elements like Ed can. But I won’t be left behind.”

Winry shook her head. “You and Ed,” she said with a mix of exasperation and fondness. “What am I going to do with you two?”

“What do you mean? I’m a lot more reasonable than Ed!”

“You know what? Sometimes I’m not so sure,” Winry said, and laughed at how outraged Al looked. At least he seemed to be getting out of his funk. 

They kept chatting about the latest Resembool gossips until Ed came back. He told them that they were letting him go today, although with strict recommendations to take it easy, and the announcement brightened all of their moods. And then, Armstrong showed up to let them know that the army had caught the airbender Scar. 

\---

The window of Roy’s office overlooked the east part of HQ’s complex of buildings. From his vantage point he could see ant-sized soldiers milling around between the buildings. The training grounds were at the very edge of the complex and sudden whirls of orange flames kept drawing his eye as he looked out. It had been a while since he’d trained. The higher his rank, the more administrative nonsense his job seemed to contain, and if he didn’t miss killing people he did miss the rush of freedom and power firebending gave him. 

Two sharp knocks on the door that undeniably belonged to Hawkeye, and Roy took a deep breath. He’d had hours-- _months_ , even--to prepare for this but he didn’t feel ready at all. Maybe this wasn’t something you could ever be ready for and you just had to keep your head down and weather it. Hands linked at his back, he turned from the window to face the door.

“Come in,” he called out.

Hawkeye, flanked with Falman and Breda, came in with the shackled prisoner, a tall, broad-shouldered Ishvalan with a crisscrossed scar on his forehead. Roy examined his face, trying to fit the man into his memories of the war, but the truth was that he didn’t remember the brother of the Air Avatar at all. He hadn’t been paying attention to him at the time, all of his focus on the Avatar and on Fuhrer Bradley, dark and murderous. 

“Thank you,” Roy said to his subordinates. “Leave us alone.”

Breda and Falman looked alarmed, but Hawkeye knew the reason for his demand and she ushered them out of the room. Roy also knew that she’d make sure that no one was listening in to their conversation. 

“You may sit down,” Roy said.

The airbender remained standing, tall and proud. “You are Colonel Roy Mustang,” he said. His voice was deep and solemn, but there was an undercurrent of boiling anger to his words. “The ‘Flame.’ One of the heroes of the Ishvalan war.”

Roy couldn’t help a chuckle at the man’s brazen attitude. As far as he knew he was facing execution, but he didn’t seem intimidated in the slightest. Not that Roy had expected any different. 

“And you’re the last Air Avatar’s brother,” he said. “Edward wouldn’t share your name.”

Scar--for lack of a better name--reacted at the mention of his brother, or maybe it was because of Edward. He tried to muffle it, but for a moment there was a quiver of unidentifiable emotion over his face before he could freeze it into a mask again. 

“What are you talking about?” he asked stiltedly. 

Roy unlocked his hands from behind his back and lay them flat on his desk, leaning forward. “You know what I’m talking about. You fought Edward Elric, didn’t you? You know what he can do. There’s no need to cover for him. I found Edward when he was eleven and had accidentally set fire to his house--and then saved his brother and himself from the blaze by going into the Avatar state.”

“The boy said something about having a friend in the army,” Scar said slowly. “Are you--”

“I’m the friend.”

Roy walked around his desk and came closer to Scar, who recoiled and crouched slightly like he wanted to fell into an airbending stance, even though there wasn’t much he could do with his hands and feet shackled together. 

“I’m sorry,” Roy said, taking a step backward. 

Scar looked nonplussed at the apology. “What exactly is this meeting about?”

Roy took a breath. _Here goes nothing_. “The Avatar needs an airbender master, and you’re the only one left.”

“I will _not_ help the army turn the Avatar into a weapon to serve this country’s ambitions!” Scar said, his voice almost reduced to a growl.

“Keep your voice down,” Roy said sharply. “You’re a smart man; you have to be, if you’ve evaded the army for so long. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that we’re having this conversation here, in my office, rather than at a jail? That I asked my subordinates to leave the two of us alone?”

“I can’t airbend with those,” Scar said, making his chains jingle, but Roy could tell that he had the man’s attention.

“I’m not completely insane. I want to have the time to explain myself to you before you try to kill me.”

“Explain, then.”

Roy paused to gather his thoughts. He’d prepared what he wanted to say in advance, but now that it was time to deliver his speech his thoughts buzzed with memories from the wars. Charred corpses, destroyed buildings. The screams of his enemies as he burned them to ashes. How did you come back from that, as a man and as a country?

“You and I,” he said, his words low and clipped, “both know that this country is going downhill and dragging the whole world down with it. Only the Avatar can restore balance, but he’s fifteen and he can’t do it alone. He was your brother at some point--you must have believed, then.”

“My brother believed.”

“Your brother still does. Your brother is alive in that boy.”

Scar’s face shuttered, and Roy thought he might have made a mistake with that line of argument. “If I refuse, I will be executed, won’t I?” Scar said. “Maybe I will be executed even if I agree, once you have no use for me. Why would I trust you?”

“You don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to like me, either. You won’t be doing it for _me_. But to answer your question, if you refuse, I will let you go. I will say that you escaped, if you promise me that you won’t hurt any other firebenders.”

Scar’s eyes narrowed. “If you do that, you will be demoted.”

“I know. But we all have to take a leap of faith.”

A few long seconds ticked by, the two of them examining each other with a mix of hostility, wariness and curiosity. They had been enemies, but if Roy managed to convince Scar that they had a common goal, then they could become something else. Not friends, certainly, not after everything that had happened in Ishval, but maybe allies.

“You can say anything you want,” Scar said. “You’re the one holding my fate in your hands.”

“You have no guarantee that I’m being truthful with you, that’s right. But when you surrendered you thought you were going to be executed, didn’t you? So you don’t have anything to lose.” Scar didn’t nod or say anything, but Mustang took the ensuing silence as him conceding the point. “Here is what we’re going to do: you will meet with Edward and talk to him. See for yourself what kind of person he is. After that, we can discuss again whether you want to teach him airbending.”

“What would happen if I agreed to teach him?”

“The normal course of things would be for you to get a summary trial and then get executed. If you agree to teach Edward, you will go through the trial and I will work at faking your execution. Once you’re done teaching him, you will be free to go where you please, knowing that the government will think you dead. What do you say?”

“All right,” Scar said after another long pause. “I will meet with Edward Elric.”

\---

When the Amestrian soldiers had arrested him, he had thought for sure that his end had finally come, and that it was how he had always portrayed it. He would have preferred to go down fighting, but he’d always known that the army would catch up with him one day. 

He had not expected Roy Mustang and their private conversation in the man’s office. He knew the man by reputation only--he knew all the firebenders by name--but he didn’t remember having ever seen him. Of course, it didn’t mean they hadn’t come across each other on the battle field, and it certainly didn’t make Mustang any less of a hateful firebender. Scar’s instinct had been to refuse the offer on principle. Surely it was a trap, a twisted mind game that the army played to humiliate him further. It wasn’t enough for them to kill all of the airbenders--he was the last of them, and they wanted to crush his spirit too. Or maybe they really wanted him to teach the Avatar, but it was to make him a weapon to turn against other countries, as he’d told Mustang. Except--

Except that the meeting had been odd and hushed, as if it hadn’t been officially approved; which meant that Mustang might be telling the truth. Except that Edward Elric _was_ the Avatar--Scar had stopped trying to convince himself otherwise--and the temptation of at least one conversation with him was too great to resist. The boy had looked and sounded nothing like his brother, but if there was something, _anything_ of Khalid left in Edward Elric, then he couldn’t refuse to see him.

They came for him at night, and everything about the circumstances surrounding his escapade screamed secrecy. The muffled conversations, the money that changed hands, the nondescript vehicle, parked behind the jail, that awaited him to transport him the spirits knew where. The blonde lieutenant that had escorted him to Mustang and who looked to be a faithful supporter of his was there again, and she blindfolded him before he got in the car. 

“My apologies,” she murmured, cool hands against the nape of his neck. “We would prefer you didn’t know where the meeting is taking place.”

It wasn’t a very long drive, but they took a lot of turns and Scar would bet that some of those turns deliberately aimed at confusing him. He let himself be led out of the car and inside a building. They took him up a flight of stairs and sat him down, his hands and feet still shackled. 

There were three other people with him in the room, but they weren’t speaking to each other until the door opened.

“Take off his blindfold.” It sounded like Mustang.

The room, when Scar was able to see it, gave him no indication of where he was. There was a window, but the curtains had been drawn and he couldn’t see what was outside. The rest of the room had been stripped from all pieces of furniture expect for a table and a few chairs. Lighter squares and rectangles on the walls showed that the room had been furnished once, and that there had been pictures on the walls. Someone had lived there, but now it had been made as impersonal as possible for Scar’s meeting with the Avatar. 

Besides Mustang and his blonde lieutenant there were two other men in the room. One was blond-haired, tall and lanky, and turned a pack of cigarette in his hands, and the other was younger and smaller, with dark hair and thick-framed glasses. Both men looked nervous and uncertain, throwing uncomfortable glances at Scar, who had the feeling that they didn’t know what this was about but were acting out of loyalty for Mustang. What sort of man was the colonel, to inspire such devotion? What sort of schemes was he spinning, to try and surround himself with his own personal guard? He was a firebender, and Scar had never thought much about firebenders’ motivations. They were a force of destruction and their existence was a blight to the world. But Mustang was in control of his fate and it bothered Scar that he couldn’t figure the man out.

“They’re here,” Mustang murmured. He’d been taking a peek between the curtains. “Havoc, Fuery, go get the Elrics. Take them here, and then you watch the entrance.”

The men nodded and left the room. Scar waited, the steady pounding of his heart letting him count the seconds. The wound on his shoulder, which had been dressed again after his arrest, throbbed dully. Neither Mustang or his lieutenant tried to talk to him, but they didn’t talk to each other either. They didn’t betray any nervousness, but the atmosphere in the room was strained, the silence uncomfortable. A lot depended on this meeting; Scar didn’t understand why it was so important for the two Amestrians, but he could feel it.

The door opened again, and the two boys that Scar had fought entered. Edward Elric wore a red coat and white gloves, the flame of a firebender pinned to his lapel as the only concession to army regulations. The other boy, the brother, held a white cane that Scar could now identify as a blind person’s instrument. He had kept his sunglasses on even though they were inside, and Scar could see the edges of several burn scars poking out from under them. He hadn’t paid much attention to the boy that last time, all his attention on the firebender who was his target, but now it seemed obvious that the boy couldn’t see. He hadn’t fought like a blind person, though.

Edward Elric, hands shoved in his pockets, scowled in direction of Scar. “What’s this, Colonel?” he said, pointing his chin at Scar’s chains. “Take them off, I’m not having a conversation with a chained man.”

“Must I remind you that this man tried to kill you?”

“Well, the whole purpose of this is for him to teach me airbending, isn’t it? He’ll need to be out of chains for that. Might as well start now.”

“It’s your funeral, Elric,” Mustang said with a sigh. “Lieutenant Hawkeye, unchain him.”

Scar had watched the exchange with a deep sense of confusion. Wasn’t Mustang supposed to be the boy’s commanding officer? Was his status as the Avatar going to Edward’s head? Scar’s deeply respectful brother would never have spoken that way to his elders; he wasn’t uncritical by any means, but he knew how to argue his point without forgetting his place.

As Hawkeye fiddled with his chains, Scar heard her voice whisper to his ear, “I’m an excellent shot. Don’t try anything.”

Hawkeye--the _Hawk’s eye_. It had been the nickname of one of Amestris’ most deadly snipers. Scar slid a glance at the woman, but her face was a cool mask of porcelain. She was used to doling out death from above and Scar had no doubt that her threats were not idle. 

“We’re going to leave you chat in peace,” Mustang said. “We’ll be right outside. Try not to get yourself beat up, all right?”

“Not getting rid of me this easily,” Edward said, flashing a cocksure smile at the colonel.

“I’m betting on that.”

As soon as Mustang and Hawkeye had left, Edward’s smile faded and he looked at Scar warily. 

“Let’s do this,” he said. He stifled a cough behind a gloved fist and settled across the table from Scar. His brother sat next to him, his expression impossible to read behind the sunglasses. “I’m Edward Elric, but you know that. This is Alphonse, my little brother. Al stays, by the way.” He didn’t sound like he was asking permission.

“All right.”

“I don’t know what Mustang hopes to get out of this. This is kind of a job interview, except that you’re pretty much the only person qualified for the job, so--But let’s get one thing straight first.” Edward’s strange golden gaze fixed itself on Scar. “I’m not your brother. Okay? So don’t-don’t hope to get him back through me or something. Your brother is dead and I’m what took his place.”

The words hit like a blow to his solar plexus. Scar knew that his brother was dead--he’d _watched_ him die, after all. He was aware that it was foolish to hold onto the hope to see Khalid in this brazen boy, but apparently it was something that his head had known but his heart had ignored. What shocked him the most, though, was to hear Edward lay it out so plainly. He had expected him to try to use his connection to Khalid to convince Scar to help, to play the emotional string.

“I know,” he said once his was sure that he could keep his voice even. 

“Good.” Edward leaned against the back of his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He coughed, looked annoyed, and asked, “How do you want me to call you, by the way? You didn’t seem to like it when I--when I called you by your name.”

“Scar is fine. I renounced my name.”

“Oooo-kay. So… wanna try not killing me and teaching me airbending instead?”

“I have a question, first.”

“That’s fair, I guess.”

“Why do you want to learn airbending?”

Scar saw Edward hesitate. The boy glanced at his brother, who’d remained quiet and still as a statue for the whole conversation. 

“Well.” Edward licked his lips nervously. “I’ve learned earthbending and firebending. This is the next step, right? I’m the Avatar. This is what I’m supposed to do.”

“Is that it? There is no other reason?”

Edward looked at his brother again. “Al…” he said, his voice very soft and almost vulnerable.

“You don’t have to tell him anything, brother,” Alphonse said. There was a hint of steel to his voice, but Scar supposed that this was only to be expected. He’d almost killed this boy’s brother as he watched--well, _listened_. Had it been worse or better, being unable to see it?

“I kind of have to. Do you mind--”

Alphonse heaved a sigh, but it sounded resigned rather than annoyed. He took off his sunglasses, and Scar couldn’t help a small movement of recoil at the sight that hid underneath. He had seen some extensive burning during the war, some of it worse than this boy’s injuries, but time must have dulled the memories because the horror he felt looking at Alphonse Elric’s ruined eyes was fresh as ever.

“I did this,” Edward said, his voice thick. “It was the first time I firebent and I did this to him.”

The glasses creaked in Alphonse’s grasp. “It was an accident,” he said. He turned his face to Scar and repeated, suddenly animated, “It was an accident! So don’t take this as proof that firebending is--makes people _evil_ , or whatever you’re probably thinking right now. My brother is a good person and he didn’t want to hurt me.”

“Hey, Al, it’s all right,” said Edward, bumping a fist against his brother’s shoulder. “The fire is in me,” he told Scar, steady and serious. “I’m just like any other firebender in that regard. _This_ proves that I couldn’t just ignore it, even though I had no desire to sign myself up to the army. I have to learn all the elements, because that’s what I am. I’m the Avatar.”

_The fire is in me, Feisal. I can’t just ignore it. I have to learn all the elements._

Scar swallowed, another face getting superposed on Edward’s young face--red eyes, a darker skin, and a pair of metal-framed glasses. The whirlwind of his memories threatened to suck him in. They’d argued time and time again, Khalid and he, about the necessity for Khalid to learn firebending. Scar hadn’t wanted his brother to touch something so hateful, but Khalid had a deep-rooted faith in his role in the balance between the elements. 

_To end this war, we need to break down the barriers between us. It can’t be airbenders against firebenders forever. I want a world where we’ll finally be able to stand together._

He’d never been able to do more than learn airbending and dabble in waterbending and earthbending. His potential had remained unfulfilled because Amestris had taken him _down._

“And when I’ll learn waterbending,” Edward went on, “I’ll be able to heal my brother. I know that’s selfish, but I need to fix my mistakes. I have to make this right.”

He addressed Scar a challenging glare, as if daring him to disapprove of his goal. “This is understandable,” Scar said. “Why didn’t you try to learn waterbending first, though?”

“Well, mastering firebending was rather urgent, at first. And then--I don’t know, it didn’t feel right not to respect the cycle. I never expected any of this--most of the time I’m not even sure what it _means_ , to be the Avatar. But at least I can try to do it as right as I know how.”

_We can’t keep going like this. It’s down to me to make things right. I don’t know how to do this, Feisal, not with the way the world is right now, but I want to try my best._

Edward Elric’s golden eyes and hair and surly attitude completely set him apart from Khalid, but at that instant, heart clenching in his chest, Scar _believed_ for the first time. 

“All right, then. I will teach you airbending.”

Edward’s eyebrows shot up. “For real? O-okay,” he said, composing himself quickly. “That’s cool. Awesome. We won’t be able to start right away, because Mustang tells me that you have to go through a trial, and a fake execution and stuff, and I--” His mouth pulled down, as if he were contemplating something unpleasant. “I’m not fit for training yet.”

“Yeah,” Alphonse said venomously, “because you _damaged_ his lungs!”

“You have my apologies,” Scar said gravely. 

Both brothers looked startled at his words, and it looked like they had taken some of the wind out of Alphonse’s sails. Edward acknowledged the apology with a nod.

“Accepted, I guess,” he said. “If you’re going to teach me, then we have to put this behind us. Okay, then.” He stood up, pushing back his chair. “Mustang is going to get you back to prison or whatever, and we’ll see each other later.”

He stepped toward the door, saw that his brother wasn’t following him and motioned him with his head. “Al, come on, let’s go.”

“I’ll join you in a minute, brother,” Alphonse said. “Go on, I’ll be right after you. I have to discuss something with Mister Scar.”

“I don’t think I should let you beat him up,” Edward said, frowning.

“I’m not going to beat him up! Don’t be stupid.” Alphonse turned his head toward his brother and said more softly, “Ed, I’ll tell you later, all right?”

Edward looked at Scar, and then back at his brother. “Okay, fine,” he said with a shrug. He rubbed his forehead with his left hand, looking tired. “Don’t take too long.”

Once he was gone, Scar told Alphonse, “If you want retribution for what I did to your brother, then it’s better if you wait after I teach him airbending.”

The boy hadn’t put his glasses back on, and when he widened his eyes it pulled at the rough scar tissue around them. His irises looked like they had been melted in a crucible. 

“What? Wait, you’re _serious_ ,” he said.

“I am perfectly serious.”

“That’s--no, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t want to fight you; I just want you not to try to kill my brother again.”

“I wouldn’t have accepted him as my student if I wanted to kill him.”

“I hope not. But I wanted to ask you something else. I want you to teach me _chi_ blocking.”

Scar hadn’t anticipated that. He was about to say, ‘ _You can easily learn that from a book,_ ’ but remembered in time that the boy couldn’t see. 

“I suppose I could show you,” he said instead. “But you’d need to be able to apply it.”

“Don’t worry about it. I use earthbending to--see, I guess, although it’s really nothing like seeing. I can also feel the vibrations from your heartbeat, which is how I know that you’re not lying when you say you will teach Ed and that you won’t try to kill him again.” The boy stood up and formally bowed his head at Scar. “I’m looking forward to those lessons,” he said.

It was only after he’d closed the door behind him that Scar realized that he’d just agreed to do what he’d said to the old man at the slum he wouldn’t do: he was going to teach a new generation. Closing his eyes, he addressed a prayer to the spirits, the first one in many years. 

_Spirits, guide me through this task. Do not let me fail this time._


	3. Chapter 3

When Mustang saw Ed come out of the room alone, he arched an eyebrow. “Where’s Alphonse?” he asked.

Ed tried to control his features, not wanting to let Mustang see that he was troubled. “He wanted to ask Scar something. He’ll be there in a minute.”

Mustang was alone in the hallway, but Ed assumed that Hawkeye, Havoc and Fuery were somewhere watching the building’s entrances. And Armstrong, who had driven them here, was probably still waiting in the car outside. Ed had wondered about the wisdom of being escorted by someone as conspicuous as Armstrong for what was supposed to be a secret meeting, but the giant was impossible to sway. The next time he took off his shirt, Ed was liable to roll into a ball and start crying. 

“Hey, since Scar has been caught, I shouldn’t need an escort anymore, right?” he asked Mustang.

“Indeed you don’t. If you’re referring to Major Armstrong, I think you better get used to him, though. You’ll probably see him around a lot.”

Ed leaned against the wall next to the door, totally not trying to overhear what Al was talking about with Scar. He broke into a yawn, not bothering to put up a hand to cover it. It normally was no trouble for him to get up in the middle of the night--Al and he were used to pulling all-nighters, reading or talking until the wee hours of the morning--but he was exhausted, even after doing pretty much nothing for days. He’d even gotten a bit winded from climbing the stairs up here, and his patience with his body’s short-comings was wearing thin.

“Be more cryptic, bastard,” he snapped at Mustang. Fighting with the colonel was always a good way to unwind. “Why can’t you ever say what you mean?”

“Is it the crick in your neck from talking to the major that makes you cranky, Elric?” Mustang said in that annoyingly smug voice of his. “Although you should be used to having to look up at people, by now.”

“ _Hey!_ What are you saying? That I’m short?”

Before Ed could really lay into Mustang, the door opened to let Al out. He didn’t look very impressed by the fact that Ed was in his commanding officer’s face, shaking his automail fist at him. 

“Really, brother,” he said, shaking his head in that disappointed way he’d inherited from their mother. “I can’t leave you on your own for five minutes.”

“He insulted me!”

“I’m sure you totally blew it out of proportions.”

Ed gave his brother an exasperated shove, examining him sideways at the same time. Al looked relaxed enough, even satisfied. Whatever he’d wanted from Scar, he must have obtained it. Ed had to refrain himself from asking questions; Al had said he would tell him in time, but they’d always spoken about anything and everything together and Ed wasn’t used to having to hold his tongue. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be on _my_ side?” he griped instead. 

“Not when you’re being unreasonable.”

“Not that I’m not having fun,” Mustang said, “but this is the middle of the night and I have a prisoner to get back to jail. Oh, and I have a message for you from Hughes: you’re invited to dinner at his temporary lodgings in East City tomorrow evening. Your friend Winry is welcome to join us, if she hasn’t left already.”

“She’s still here,” Ed said. She would enjoy going out, as she hadn’t been anywhere in the city except for the hospital and her hotel. “Will you be there too?” he asked Mustang.

“Hughes seems like he wants to make the most of his time in East City, so I’ll be there, as well as Lieutenant Hawkeye,” Mustang said.

His voice and his face expressed nothing but the usual Hughes-related exasperation, and yet Ed had the feeling that there was more to this dinner than met the eye. 

“All right, we’ll be there,” he said. Another yawn escaped him, and the world was getting slightly fuzzy at the edges. “Wouldn’t miss hours of Hughes babbling about his wife and daughter.”

“Come on, brother,” Al said, tugging at Ed’s sleeve. “Let’s get you to bed. Thank you for arranging this, Colonel. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

Ed let Al lead him away, but only because he was too tired to protest. He didn’t ask Al what he’d talked about with Scar in the car drive to the barracks, mostly because Armstrong was there too, being effusive as ever. He didn’t ask about it once they were back to their room because he crashed on his bed almost immediately. In the morning, though, he felt like he’d waited long enough.

“Hey, Al.” He was washing his face at the sink tucked in a corner of the room they shared; leaning over it, he had his back on the rest of the room and couldn’t see his brother. “What did you talk about with Scar yesterday?”

“Ah. This was nothing, really.”

Al sounded oddly embarrassed. His curiosity piqued Ed straightened up, water dripping in his eyes, and twisted around to look at his brother. Al appeared to be folding some of his clothes, but a closer look told Ed that he was actually just fidgeting with the fabric. 

“Come on, you can tell me,” he said. “I won’t laugh.”

Al gave him his doubtful tilt of the head. “You totally _would_ , brother. But it’s not--Fine. I just asked him if he could teach me _chi_ blocking.”

“Oh.” Ed wasn’t fully sure what was so embarrassing about it, but he figured that Al was still working through his feelings about the fight where he’d ended up so helpless. “That’s cool. Do you think I--will you show me what he’s taught you?”

The line of Al’s shoulders relaxed and Ed knew he’d said the right thing. “Of course. I’ll need someone to practice using _chi_ blocking techniques with earthbending.”

“Oh, so now I’m a practice dummy? Thanks a lot, bro.”

Al threw a pillow at him, eerily accurate, but Ed managed to dodge it. “Aha! Loosing your touch, Al?” A second pillow hit him in the face, muffling his cry of surprise and outrage.

“Get dressed, Ed.”

Armstrong had taken Winry on a tour of East City, and since Ed was still technically on sick leave--even though he absolutely didn’t need it, thank you very much--they had nothing to do but go to the library and read on airbending and on the Avatar. At least, Ed read while Al on one of his own books, the second volume in a dreary ten-volume series on Amestris’ history. They commented their readings to each other, using the other as a soundboard, and the day was slow-paced and mellow, reminiscent of their childhood when they poured through their father’s library together for hours. 

“Hey, brother,” Al said, “did you know that one of the first northern territories that Amestris conquered held a sacred source that was supposed to draw a lot of water spirits? It was said to be one of the most spiritual places to waterbenders. I wonder what happened to it. Didn’t Lior have a sacred source too?”

“No, I think it was a pond and a garden. The Spirits Oasis or something. Cornello claimed that it was the oasis that had drawn him to the city or whatever. What an idiot.”

“Could you feel it?” Al asked curiously. “The Avatar is supposed to be a bridge between people and the spirits. Does that sort of place feel different to you?”

Ed hesitated, though he wasn’t sure why. Sometimes he felt uncomfortable going deeply into Avatar-specific stuff with his brother, maybe because he feared that Al would think he was bragging. Growing up as earthbenders in a firebender nation had set them apart, but bonded them together. He didn’t like feeling different from his brother.

“Yeah, kind of,” he said. “I could feel it like--the way you know where the sun is, because you can feel its warmth on your face.”

“It would be interesting to visit other spiritual places to see if you feel the same.”

“Most of them aren’t easily accessible, though, like in Briggs or in Ishval. And I don’t know how my automails would react to extreme temperatures, but my guess is not well.”

“Yeah, probably. Still, it would be interesting.”

By the end of the afternoon Ed was tired enough that dinner with Hughes and the others felt like a chore, but both Al and Winry seemed excited about it so he didn’t voice his complaints. They generally didn’t have much time for social outings and Winry wasn’t often there, so Ed had to admit that it was a nice change of pace. Hughes was lodged close to HQ, but in a non-military complex of apartments, and Ed, Al and Winry were able to walk there. 

On their way to their destination, Winry recounted her day as a tourist to them. “And I was surprised by how many people with automail I saw! People here don’t tend to flaunt them, but I could tell from the way they walked or moved. I’m sure there are a lot more in Rush Valley--you _will_ take me to Rush Valley one day, will you, Ed?--but it was interesting all the same.”

“Well, there is quite a big military presence here,” Al pointed out. “And we’re not far from Ishval. I can tell when people have automail--I can feel the metal in their limbs through earthbending.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know that! Can you tell differences in design?”

“Uhh, I can’t say that I’ve really paid that much attention--”

“How come you’ve spent the whole day visiting the city, and all you’re talking about is automail?” Ed said. “You’re unbelievable. Do you ever think about anything else?”

“Well, forgive me my professional curiosity! One of the reasons I have an eye out for other automails is that I’m always looking for ways to improve _yours_ , you ungrateful jerk.”

Winry punctuated her tirade with a slap at the back of Ed’s head and Ed cried out. “What’s wrong with you? You know, maybe I’m ungrateful because you’re always hitting me!”

A long-suffering Al in tow, Ed and Winry kept bickering until they’d reached Hughes’ building. The fighting felt weirdly nostalgic. Ed knew he was a bad friend--he rarely called unless he needed something and visited even less. He told himself that once he’d healed Al he could work on reestablishing some sense of normalcy between he and Winry, but he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to. The heavy burden of the Avatar’s mantel, hazy as it was, wasn’t something that would come to an end before he died. He found himself thinking about it more and more these days, and it always made him feel like he’d swallowed a bunch of rocks.

“Hey, Ed, listen to me when I’m talking to you!” Ed found Winry giving him a half-pissed, half-concerned look. 

“I’m listening! But I’m also watching where I’m going--or do you want me to run into people just to show I’m paying attention to you?”

“I thought that you could sense obstacles with earthbending.”

“Hey, guys,” Al said. “We’re there, so please try to behave.”

Hughes opened the door at their knocking, wearing an apron saying ‘I Love My Wife’ spelled out in bright pink letters.

“What the fuck is that?” Ed said.

“Why, Ed, men can cook too, you know?” Hughes was holding a wooden spoon and he waved it under Ed’s nose. 

“Yes, Ed,” Winry chimed in. “Don’t be sexist.”

“That’s not what I--” Ed started, but his brother was already pushing him inside.

Mustang and Hawkeye were already there, and they, as well as Hughes, were out of their uniforms and wearing civilian clothes. The casualness of it all was making Ed a little uncomfortable, almost like he’d caught them in their underwear. Hawkeye was wearing a _skirt_ , for spirits’ sake! Hughes had apparently roped Mustang into cooking with him, and the colonel had an apron on too, although it was a sober navy blue and had nothing written on it. He was stirring something in a pot that smelled delicious, and the grumpy expression on his face considerably improved Ed’s mood. 

“Colonel, I think it’s the first time I see you do something with your hands that isn’t firebending or holding a pen! Did Hughes blackmail you or something?”

Mustang threw him a baleful look over his shoulder. “Look at that, the height average in this room has just been considerably reduced,” he said.

The flames under Mustang’s pot jumped. “Don’t call me short, you shitty excuse for--”

“Roy, don’t antagonize our guests,” Hughes said. “Any burn marks in this apartment are going to be taken off my salary. Ed, why don’t you help Riza set the table while Winry and Al help me with the dessert?”

Ed and Hawkeye made a swift work of setting the table and dinner was served in no time. It was only once he’d started eating that Ed realized that some of his crankiness was probably due to hunger. Al and he had had a quick lunch of bread and cheese, but the food was now barely more than a memory. Hughes--and Mustang, apparently--had prepared a salad, roasted beef with mashed potatoes and chocolate cake with red frosting for dessert. Half-way through the meal, Ed felt a lot more at peace with the world than he had one hour before.

They chatted of inconsequential topics--the weather, Havoc’s dating habits, the latest installment in a popular radio show that Ed didn’t follow--but underneath the veneer of casual conversation Ed could feel something else lurking. It was as though they were all pretending, waiting for a cue before the real purpose of this dinner could come to light. 

After dinner, Hughes made them a coffee so strong that Ed felt he might never sleep again. Hughes sipped his nonchalantly, an arm draped over the back of his chair, and then he said, “So, the Avatar, huh.”

Winry dropped the spoon she was using to add sugar to her coffee into her cup, making a surprised sound. Al frowned at Mustang and said in a rather accusatory tone, “Colonel?” Ed would have been pissed too, except that he’d thought Hughes knew already. 

“We’re going to need help if we want to fake Scar’s execution,” Mustang said guardedly.

“How many people have you told, Mustang?” Ed asked.

“No one I couldn’t trust.”

Which meant that he hadn’t just told Hughes. Al had picked up on that too, and he wasn’t happy. “So you’re just going around, spreading my brother’s secret--”

“The colonel is a paranoid bastard,” Ed cut him in. “The people he opened up to are probably on a very short list.”

Mustang’s smile was sharp. “You’re a master at backhanded compliments, Elric.”

“I don’t understand anything about your crazy bender legends,” Hughes said offhandedly. “But faking an execution? I can work on that.”

“What if they go for a public execution?” Al said. “I hear that for the most spectacular ones they--they burn people to _death_. In front of an audience. I don’t see how we can fake that.”

“They won’t go for a public execution,” Hawkeye said. “Scar has only ever gone for firebenders, and given how unpopular the army and firebenders in particular are with the general population, a lot of people actually consider him a hero.”

“Serial murder is fashionable, I guess,” Ed commented sourly.

“They won’t risk turning him into a martyr,” Hawkeye went on, but not without casting him a look of sympathy. “Also, after claiming for years that all the airbenders had been killed, the government doesn’t want to draw too much attention to the fact that they’ve botched that job and that it’s backfired rather nastily on them.”

“What’s the mode of execution when it’s not public?” Winry asked. She looked a little overwhelmed at being made part of the discussion, but she wouldn’t let herself be pushed to the side.

“Lethal injection,” Hughes said. “Which works in our favor, in fact, if we can manage to switch the drug to something that won’t kill but will give the appearance of death.”

“Something like tetrodotoxin?” Ed said. “But the dosage would need to be extremely careful if we don’t want it to actually kill him. One mistake, and we’ve blown my only chance at an airbender master.”

“I know a doctor, an acquaintance from the war, who can work on that,” Mustang said. “I won’t tell him about your brother, Alphonse, so you can stop giving me the evil eye.”

“But can we trust someone sketchy enough to work on a poison without asking questions?” Al asked dubiously. 

“We owe each other multiple favors,” Mustang said. “Let me worry about that part.”

“The execution will take place in the execution chamber at East City Central Prison, where Scar will be transferred after his trial,” Hughes said. “Only the execution team, the warden, and a few people from the government--possibly Bradley himself, for the occasion--will be present. That doesn’t concern us much, because the crucial moment will be when we have to get the body back. After the execution, the corpse is cremated. Obviously, we’ll need to intercept it before that happens.”

“So, what, are you going to pay off someone?” Ed asked. He grimaced. “And to switch the drug for the injection too? I don’t know that I like to have that many people involved.”

“For the drug, I’ll do it myself,” Hughes said as though it was nothing. “I’m on an inspection mission for Central, and inspecting the prisons is part of it.”

“And you’ll know how to--wait, I don’t think I want to know,” Ed said. 

“Hughes’ competences aren’t all on the legal side,” Mustang said. 

“My very existence has always been illegal, mine and Al’s too,” Ed said. “So I’m not too fussed about that.”

Winry gave him a covert look that he couldn’t quite decipher, and Ed wondered if she minded being included in their treasonous activities. Knowing him and Al had never brought her anything but sorrow and trouble. 

“Wonderful,” Hughes said cheerfully, clasping his hands. “I’m glad I was there for this historical moment. Roy, Riza, we are now fully the outlaws we’ve always wanted to be.”

The three adults exchanged a quick look, something passing between them that Ed could only partly understand. He swallowed, sharing a look of his own with Al. Whatever happened next, there was now no going back.

\--- 

In the two months that included his trial and the preparations for his execution, Scar had more than enough time to regret agreeing to Mustang’s mad plan. The colonel had explained to him how they proposed to fake his execution and then hadn’t come back. It made sense that he wouldn’t want too much contact between them in case someone got suspicious or connected the dots after the fact, but in the privacy of his own narrow cell, there was a question Scar asked himself again and again: could he trust the colonel? He’d managed to convince himself that there was nothing Mustang could gain from lying about the fake execution. But what if the drug switch was found out before the execution? What if the drug killed him anyway? What if they couldn’t intercept his body in time and he died in the prison’s crematory oven, devoured by the flames like so many of his people? That last part was what bothered him the most. In the days before his execution was scheduled, he was plagued every night with nightmares where he felt the heat of flames lick his skin. He’d been burned multiple times in his battles with firebenders, but in his dreams his body was paralyzed and he was helpless, unable to flee or to retaliate. He woke up with all his muscles locked to the point of pain, his body covered in cold sweat. 

When the day of the execution finally came, it was almost a relief. He did not fear death--he’d been in a dance with it for so long that it was a close companion. He’d given it and seen it given to people he loved. Even if Mustang and his allies botched the job, at least he would finally be allowed peace. Therefore, it was in a state of meditative calm that he welcomed the prison guards who came for him at the end of the intended day. They led him to a small room that had a cut-out window at the end of it showing another room. They strapped him to a bed and hooked him to an IV, and he let them do it without even a token fight. From the explanations he’d been given beforehand, Scar knew that he would be first injected with a product that should make him sleep, a sleep that he was not supposed to ever wake up from. 

Turning his head to avoid dwelling on the needle sticking in his arm, Scar saw that the room behind the glass pane had now a few people in it. Spectators, who had come to make sure that the bane of the Amestrian army had finally met his end. They were all middle-aged men, and all were dressed in the blue Amestrian uniform. No firebenders, because Amestris treated its firebenders like attack dogs and rarely let them reach the higher ranks--Colonel Mustang seemed to be an exception in that regard, and Scar didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad sign for their future dealings. Providing that Scar really had a future, of course.

One of those men stood out from the rest. Not by his uniform, but because the others remained one respectful step behind him, and because his was a face that had marked Scar’s memory like a hot iron brand. His one cool eye that wasn’t obscured by a patch looked at Scar with as much consideration one would give to an insect. It was the same expression he’d had when he killed Khalid after his surrender, all those years ago. Did Furher Bradley recognize Scar for the brother of the Air Avatar? Scar’s real identity had never been mentioned even once during his trial.

Looking at the man, all of the old hatred and rage came back rushing at him. He pictured himself breaking the leather straps that wrapped his wrists and ankles, jumping across the door and through the glass that separated him from the Furher. He would be dead long before he could reach the man, but the image was so vivid in his mind that his whole body tensed. He saw one of the attendants preparing him for the execution make a jerky motion of surprise and alarm. 

“Increase the dosage,” the man said to one of his colleagues. 

The sedative was starting to take effect and Scar’s world blurred around the edges, his mind feeling fuzzy and his body heavy and lethargic. Still, he kept his eyes on the figure of King Bradley behind the glass. 

He didn’t know what awaited him after the sleep that he could feel take its hold on him. Would he go to the land of the spirits, reunite with his ancestors? Would he be cast away for his sins, condemned to wander the earth for all eternity as a cursed soul? Or would he wake up in this world again, alive, free to make something new of his life?

 _Even if I never manage to kill you myself,_ he thought in direction of Bradley, _I hope that one day your world will come crashing down around your ears. I hope you see it_ burn.

His eyelids weighed too much for him to be able to keep his eyes open. As he finally closed them, he sent that last thought into the void. 

\---

Against almost all expectations, he woke up again. He was in a bed, his head resting on a soft pillow and his body on a firm mattress. He was first aware of the ache in his head, and then that the rest of his body was sore too, not as if he’d been injured but as if he was recuperating from a long bout of illness. 

He felt all of that long before he even opened his eyes. Once he was awake enough to know that he was alive, he examined his surroundings with all of his senses but sight. He couldn’t be in prison because the bed was too nice, and because it didn’t smell the same. He could smell laundry detergent and waxed wood, and when a soft breeze caressed his skin he smelled grass and wild flower. A window must be open, because he could also hear birds chirping outside. If he hadn’t hurt so much he would have thought that for sure this was the afterlife.

He opened his eyes. He was alone in the room, which was sparsely furnished. He saw whitewashed walls, hardwood floorboard and green curtains floating lightly to the wind; besides the bed he was lying in, there was a nightstand and a large wardrobe at the other end of the room, next to a door. 

_Where am I?_

Mustang had said that he would be brought to a safe place outside of East City to recover and then to teach Edward airbending, but he hadn’t been given any details. The colonel hadn’t said who would be with him for his recuperation, but surely he hadn’t been left alone. Slowly Scar pushed himself into a sitting position, paused long enough for the dizziness to pass, and then threw the covers off of himself and his legs out of the bed. Just as he was working at hauling himself upright, the door opened.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

It was Mustang’s blonde lieutenant, the Hawk’s eye. She wasn’t wearing her uniform but casual clothes, pants and a white blouse, and her hair was loose.

“Good,” she said. “I’d come to check on your vitals. You weren’t supposed to wake up until a few more hours.”

He watched her, a hand on the wall to support himself, not knowing what to say. He wanted to walk across the room and get out, but his body felt weak and shaky and he didn’t want to fall on his face in front of an enemy soldier. Even if that enemy soldier was supposed to be something of an ally, now.

“You should sit down,” Hawkeye said. “This has been hard on your body and you’re going to need more rest.”

He did what she said, mostly because he could feel that his body was going to make the decision for him anyway. “Where are we?” he asked. 

The lieutenant walked to the window to close it. “This was my father’s house--mine, now, although I have trouble thinking about it as such. We chose this location because the closest neighbors are five miles away. My father wasn’t keen on human contact.” She turned to Scar, crossing her arms over her chest. “He was a firebender, my father. But strangely enough, he shared some beliefs with you. He thought that firebenders could do nothing but destroy.”

“And you don’t?”

“After everything I’ve seen, I guess I should. It’s probably foolish of me to hope otherwise. But--Airbenders believe in the balance of the elements, right? You believe that everything has a reason to exist.”

“Whatever we believed, we’ve clearly been proven wrong,” Scar said bitterly.

“I don’t know that you were. Firebending must have its place in the world, same as the other elements. Its mistake was to try to take _more_ than its rightful place.” She smiled; the expression was reserved, but not devoid of warmth. “I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear an enemy soldier blabber about your own beliefs. I’ll go get you something to eat; you must be starving.”

Scar discovered that he was indeed hungry when his stomach rumbled as though it had just woken up and wasn’t happy with the state of things. Hawkeye brought him bread and chicken broth, and left him alone to eat.

The next few days rolled by in a strange bubble of peace and quiet. Scar had been on the run for so long that this felt almost unreal to him. Lieutenant Hawkeye was an unobtrusive companion, who didn’t talk much to him unless he manifested a desire for conversation. They saw no one else, save for a surly doctor named Knox who gave Scar a clean bill of health, claiming that he was recovering faster and better than anyone had a right to hope. He gave Scar the feeling that he was or had been an army surgeon, and he was old enough to have served in Ishval, but they didn’t really talk so he never had the confirmation. 

As he felt better, Scar started to feel more and more restless too. He hadn’t stayed in the same place in years and this was making him paranoid. He wasn’t a prisoner--Hawkeye didn’t seem to bother watching him and he was left alone more often than not--but the fact that he hadn’t seen Mustang or Edward since before his fake death made him wonder whether there was something going on that he wasn’t aware of. Had he fallen for some elaborate deceit, and the purpose for his being spared was a completely different one? Should he really stay here, waiting obediently to see what Mustang and his clique had in store for him? Eventually, he forced himself to ask Lieutenant Hawkeye about it.

“When am I going to start teaching Edward?”

She looked away from the vegetables she was cutting. “Soon,” she said. “Edward has been back to work for about a month, but he was on desk duty until he was cleared by the doctors, so he couldn’t come--in order to give an excuse to be here, Mustang would have to send him on a long mission.”

“What’s _your_ excuse for being here?”

“I’m on leave, and this is my house. There’s nothing strange about my presence here.”

Scar looked at her hands deftly moving the knife over the wooden board. She was a killer, just as he was, and it made it fascinating to watch her do something so mundane. 

“Do you believe Edward Elric can change the world?”

She paused, as if giving careful thought to his question. “I believe so, yes. He’s quite a handful, as you’ll quickly come to realize, but he has a good heart and a remarkable strength of character. I--” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I saw your brother die. So did Colonel Mustang.”

Scar had to remind himself to breathe. “Did you?” he said as neutrally as he could.

“I saw him--alive for just a few minutes, but it was enough for me to see that same strength of character.”

“My brother was very different from Edward.”

“I don’t pretend that I knew him, of course. There was something about him, though--I feel like I can see the same thing in Edward. But it could just be wishful thinking.”

“No,” Scar said after a moment. “No, I think I see what you mean.”

It took another week before Edward could come, and when he did he had his brother with him. Both brothers arrived right before dinner, dusty and tired from their trip. Just like that, the peace and quiet from the last couple of weeks was shattered into a million pieces.

“If you’d told us your time of arrival, I would have picked you up at the train station,” Hawkeye said. 

“We weren’t sure we’d manage to catch that train,” Edward said. His stomach groaned and the boy rubbed it with a pained expression. “Spirits, I’m so hungry I could have eaten some of the cows we passed on our way here. Why is this house so hard to find, by the way? We’ve been walking around in circles for almost an hour!”

“That’s because you were so impatient that you just _had_ to get that early train,” Alphonse said. If he hadn’t been blind, he would have probably been glaring at his brother. “If we’d just done as we’d planned, Lieutenant Hawkeye would have picked us up at the station!”

“The house’s isolation is the very reason we chose it for your training,” Hawkeye explained. “And it’s a good thing I did grocery shopping today with your arrival in mind--I should be able to fix something for you quickly.”

“Thank you, lieutenant,” Alphonse said politely. 

The brothers’ presence filled the silent spaces that had settled between Scar and Lieutenant Hawkeye. Edward was loud and boisterous, even though Scar detected a hint of nervousness under all the noise, and Alphonse was quieter except when he bickered with his brother. They were studying him as much as he was studying them, but it was done covertly and soon enough they all started to relax. 

The next morning, Scar took Edward to the courtyard behind the house. 

“What are those things?” the boy asked, twirling a finger at the objects occupying the center of the courtyard.

Scar had been busy during the week preceding the Elrics’ arrival, and now several wooden gates turned in different directions were gathered on a round platform. It was crude work, nothing like the beautifully carved gates from the temple where Scar had done his classes, but it would have to do.

“Air is the element of freedom. It’s about flexibility, about finding and following the path of least resistance. This is why we have a lot of spiral movements: when you meet resistance, you must be able to change directions at once.”

“Yeah, I’ve read all about it.”

“But now you have to _experience_ it. Your primary element is Earth, right?” At the boy’s nod, he went on, “Air is opposite to Earth, which is about resisting and enduring. It’s likely to be the most difficult element for you to master.”

Edward responded to the provocation with a raised eyebrow. “Doesn’t tell me what those wooden things are.”

“It’s one of the most basic exercises from airbending training. The goal is to make through the gates without touching them. While they’re spinning.”

Scar expected Edward to protest, or maybe to boast that it would be easy for him, but he only kept watching the gates thoughtfully, as though already thinking about the exercise. Scar’s surprise must have been visible on his face, because Edward shot him a wry glance. 

“I’ve gone through training for two different elements, you know,” he said. “My earthbending teacher was a sadist, and, well, you’ve met the colonel. Weirdass exercises don’t faze me anymore.”

So Mustang had been Edward’s firebending master; it did make sense that the colonel wouldn’t let the Avatar’s training to anyone else, whatever his plans for him were. Scar was a hit by a stray thought of his brother, who had only ever gone through proper airbending training. He’d tried to work on waterbending and earthbending on his own but had never really mastered them, and having a real eartbender and a real waterbender as masters would have probably made all the difference. Khalid’s time had passed, though--this was Edward’s turn now. 

“To be an airbender, you have to be like a leaf in the wind,” he said, shoving all thoughts of the past to the back of his mind. 

He plucked a leaf from the oak tree that was planted at the edge of the courtyard and cast a large shadow over it. He let it drop and watched it float down and then away, carried by a breath of wind. At this instant, Alphonse came out of the house. He was wearing his sunglasses but didn’t hold the white cane, which Scar had noticed he hadn’t used last night either, even though it looked like he’d never been here before. 

“Do you mind if I watch you?” he asked, addressing Scar.

Scar looked at Edward, who shrugged. “All right, you may stay.”

“Thank you.” 

Alphonse sat with his back against the tree, watching them with this mysterious earthbending sense of his.

“I will demonstrate the exercise,” Scar said to Edward.

Facing the cluster of gates, he took on an airbending stance, then raised his hands and whirled them together, until he’d gathered enough air that he released by thrusting his hands forward. The burst of wind made the gates start to spin rapidly and Scar ran toward them. As he weaved his way through them, switching directions any time a gate might brush against him, he let go of everything that had happened for the last few months--even for the last _years_. _You’re a leaf floating in the wind,_ he heard in his old master’s voice. _You’re unfettered, unconcerned. Don’t resist._ He had no substance and was merely one fluid, sinuous movement fleeing the hard surface of the wooden boards.

When he emerged on the other side, he gave himself a moment of pause. He wasn’t tired or out of breath, but he was disturbed. He hadn’t done this in many years, since it was a beginner’s exercise, but he also hadn’t moved like that in a long time. He saw Edward coming up to him, with on his face what Scar thought might be a mildly impressed look, and he remembered punching air at the boy when he’d tried to kill him. Somewhere along the way he’d started fighting like the firebenders, mimicking their overtly aggressive style. 

Scar schooled his face and told Edward, “Your turn, now.”

Edward put on a determined expression. He took off the jacket and the gloves he was wearing, and for the first time Scar saw the automail arm he’d already suspected was there, having heard metallic clinking when they fought. He hadn’t expected how big and monstrous it would look on the boy’s smaller stature, or the burn scars on his bare flesh arm. It looked like fire didn’t even spare its masters. 

Edward threw his clothes to the side, then wove his fingers together and stretched. Alphonse, cupping his hands around his mouth, shouted, “You can do it, brother!”

Edward flashed his sibling a quick smile. “All right, let’s do this!”

He launched himself at the gates. Almost immediately, Scar could have told him that he was being too forceful about it, but the purpose of the exercise was that he would eventually come to that realization himself. For the next few minutes Scar listened to the strings of curses and muffled cries of pain as Edward slammed into almost all the gates on his way through. He emerged on the other side stumbling, slightly disheveled and looking incensed.

“They’re spinning faster than when you did it!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Scar.

“No, they weren’t,” Scar said calmly.

“They weren’t, brother,” Alphonse confirmed. 

Edward closed his mouth, still looking angry but less suspicious now that his brother had chimed in. He then looked back to the gates as if they were a group of enemy soldiers, his jaw set and his eyes glinting liked polished gold nuggets. Squaring his shoulders, he ran toward the gates again. This was the beginning of a long, painful morning. Painful mostly for Edward, but watching him get battered by the gates, thrown to his feet but always getting back up for more was a trial of its own. Scar tried to tell him to take a break, but his words fell on deaf ears. Alphonse tried too, but he seemed to know that it was a lost cause.

“When he gets like this he won’t listen to anyone,” he said. “When he was recuperating from automail surgery, he--” Alphonse cut himself off, looking like he’d just remembered who he was talking to. “He’s so stubborn.”

“Unfortunately, stubbornness is pretty much the opposite of what’s needed to succeed in this exercise. He has to learn how to let go.”

“To let go, huh?” The boy turned his face toward Scar, and for a moment Scar would have sworn that Alphonse was actually _looking_ at him behind those dark sunglasses of his. “That’s not my brother’s forte. When he’ll be about to drop from exhaustion, you can try your speech about being a leaf in the wind again. In the meantime, would you start teaching me about _chi_ blocking?”

\---

Earthbending training had been hell, but it was mostly because of Izumi Curtis’ belief that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. Firebending training hadn’t started so well, but once Ed had gotten past his mental block about fire, it had gone pretty smoothly. With two elements under his belt, Ed could tell with a certain amount of authority that airbending was the _worst_. Three days after the training had officially started, Ed still couldn’t make his way through the gates without being beaten black and blue by the damn things, and Scar adamantly refused to work on actual airbending before he had successfully completed the exercise. 

“There _has_ to be a trick,” he told Al, ducking to the side at the same time to avoid one of his brother’s earthspikes. 

They were putting Al’s lessons from Scar on _chi_ blocking into practice by trying to combine it with earthbending. The purpose of the game was for Al to try to hit one of Ed’s vital points with earth, and for Ed to dodge the attempts and fight back using only earthbending. Intellectually Ed was interested in how to use earthbending and _chi_ blocking, but mostly he was glad for the occasion to let off steam. He couldn’t use earthbending as often as he might have wished, but there was a grounded aspect to the art that always made him feel better, more in tune with the world around him.

“Scar told you what the trick was, Ed,” Al said. He lifted his left knee and then stomped on the ground, before punching the block of earth that had levitated and hurling it toward Ed. 

Ed erected a wall of earth to hide and shouted from over it, “That ‘leaf in the wind’ bullshit? I’m talking about a real trick, some kind of hidden mechanism, I don’t know.”

His wall crumbled to dust, but he’d already started working on his counterattack and had a series of rapid-fire earth shots ready for his brother. Al dodged, blocked and threw the last rocks back at Ed. One of them hit Ed’s arm at the elbow crease and his whole arm went numb. He swore, trying to move it and failing.

“Ed?” Al asked, lowering his hands and letting them fall to his sides. “Are you hurt, or--”

“No, but my arm is numb and I can’t move it.”

“So it worked? That’s great!”

“Don’t sound so excited,” Ed said, but there was no heat behind his words. He started massaging his arm, but it didn’t do much for the numbness. “It seems like the strength behind the strike has to be very precise--too strong or too weak, and it doesn’t have the desired results. Interesting.”

Al sauntered up to him. “It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be, but if I can make it work it would be a huge advantage in battle.”

Since it was just the two of them messing around behind Hawkeye’s house, Al had taken off his glasses. Ed was more or less used to the scars by now and he preferred to be able to Al’s whole face--it was so mobile that it always broadcast every one of his emotions very clearly. He was happy right now, excited that he was getting further away from the version of himself that had his ass kicked by Scar. Ed, on the other hand, couldn’t say that he’d made the same amount of progress. 

“You’ll figure it out, brother,” Al said, reading his mind as always.

“Yeah.” The numbness in his arm felt more disturbing than pain, his old companion, would have. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if I’m capable of airbending at all.”

“Of course, you are! You’re the Avatar. Don’t tell me you’re giving up already?”

“No!” Ed said, giving him a shove. “I can’t give up. It’s just, I don’t know, frustrating.”

“Have you tried talking to Khalid? He could give you tips.”

Ed had not, in fact, tried to talk to Khalid--he’d actually not even entertained the possibility. “Scar is giving me tips already. They had the same training, so I don’t know what he could tell me that his brother hasn’t said already.”

“Yeah, but it’s not quite the same, is it? I mean, Khalid is… you, sort of. Maybe he could let you _feel_ what it’s like to airbend.”

Ed tried to look doubtful, ashamed that he hadn’t thought of that himself. _He_ was supposed to be the freaking Avatar! His little brother shouldn’t be the one coming up with that kind of idea.

“I’ll think about it,” he said vaguely.

That night he lay in bed, thinking about it. Al and he were sharing a room on the top floor, next to Hawkeye’s own room, which was actually her father’s old room. Scar slept on the ground floor, and Ed had wondered before if the separation was deliberate. Al was fast asleep right now, as Ed could tell from his breathing. He hadn’t mentioned again his suggestion that Ed would try to talk to Khalid, but Ed had thought about it for the whole day.

He’d never tried to reach out for his former incarnation willingly, was the thing. And he’d never talked to him when he was awake. Did he need to be asleep to access that part of himself? Could he just try really hard to think about it? He focused for a moment, closing his eyes and picturing in his mind the image of Khalid that he’d seen before, with his brown skin, red eyes and white hair, wearing glasses and airbender monk robes. Then he focused harder, trying to fine-tune his recollection of Khalid to something more life-like: he tried to remember the exact shape of his smile, the crinkles at the corner of his eyes, the kindness of his expression. All it did was give him the start of a headache. _Khalid!_ he thought furiously, calling out for the young man in his mind. _Oi, wake up! I need to talk to you!_ The only answer he got was the feverish buzz of his own thoughts. 

He had a hard time falling asleep after that, having gotten himself too worked up for rest. When he finally found sleep, his dreams were agitated and confused. Bits and pieces of childhood memories, from his first fumbling with earthbending alongside Al to his hardcore training with Izumi, were mixed with a confused nightmare where he got beaten down by trees and tried to fight back by blowing at them. He woke up once during the night, got up to get himself a glass of water, and went back to bed. This time he fell asleep almost immediately and started dreaming about a white temple in the desert, the heat from the unrelenting sun beating down on the back of his neck. He stood in a paved courtyard, watching a little boy limp out a cluster of carved wooden gates looking like the ones Scar used for his training. A crowd of other boys of around eight or ten were there too, pointing at the little boy and laughing, some more overtly than others. 

The boy headed for him, obviously trying to pretend that he didn’t care about the other kids, although he was betrayed by his bright red cheeks. “This is so stupid,” he said once he was close enough. “Why do we need to do this? This isn’t airbending!”

Ed instinctively knew that this boy was a younger Scar, even if he looked almost nothing like the adult version he knew, and not just because he didn’t have a scar yet. He knew he stood between the walls of the Southern Air Temple, where Khalid and his brother Feisal had been taught airbending together, years and years ago. At the same time, he knew that this place had been destroyed during the war and that all the children he could see were now long dead, except for one. 

But he was also caught in that specific moment of Khalid’s memory and he-- _Khalid_ \--chuckled and reached out to ruffle his brother’s hair. “We need to learn how to move to be good airbenders,” he said.

Feisal dodged his hand, scowling at him. “We need to manipulate _air_ to be airbenders! You say that because you’ve managed to do the stupid exercise.”

“You’ll manage it too, and then you’ll see that it isn’t so hard. You just have to let go.”

“Let go? What does that--”

\-- _even mean?_ Ed woke up, the tail end of Feisal’s sentence echoing in his mind. For a moment he couldn’t recognize the room he was in, because it didn’t look at all like the dorms at the temple--And then he saw Al asleep in the other bed, the pale rays of early morning sun forming a halo around his head, and he remembered at once where he was and _who_ he was. A violent shiver ran through him at the sudden realization that for a moment he’d confused himself with Khalid, and he buried his face in his hands. It took him a few breaths before he’d regained his composure.

At breakfast, it was awkward to see Scar and be reminded of the young, scowling boy of his dream. For the first time he felt a pang of grief for the way Scar’s life had been wrecked irreparably; he imagined Al, some twenty, thirty years later, with Ed having died and left his little brother alone to pick up the pieces. At the thought both of his fists clenched under the table. He couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ let that happen.

“Brother?” Al asked, head tilted to the right.

Ed shook himself. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep very well. Lots of messed up dreams.”

“Did you dream--”

“I’ll tell you later,” Ed said, tapping his foot on the floor to let Al know that he’d rather not get into it in front of Scar and Hawkeye. Al nodded to show him he understood.

Inevitably, Ed found himself standing once again in front of those cursed gates. He thought back to his dream, which hadn’t contained any useful information. The bit about ‘letting go’ was something Scar had repeated to him until the words had lost all meaning. _Thanks a lot, Khalid! Very helpful!_

“Let’s try this again,” Scar said, and the note of resignation in his voice set off Ed.

“Oh, because you did so much better when you were learning,” he snapped. “Weren’t you calling this exercise _stupid_?”

Scar looked at him, a startled expression on his face. Al, who was sitting in the grass and weaving a crown of daisies, dropped the flowers in his lap and frowned, which was when Ed realized what he’d just said.

“How do you--” Scar said and trailed off. 

“Well,” Ed said, feeling himself blush. 

Scar and he had never talked about how much Ed knew from Khalid, and Ed thought that Scar didn’t really want to know so he could keep thinking of Ed as a separate person from his brother. Since Ed also wanted him to think of them as separate people, he’d gone along with it and hadn’t meant to reveal that much right now. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I just had a random dream last night of you and--and Khalid learning airbending. I think those gates are getting to me.” 

Scar studied him for a moment longer before looking away. “Right. Let’s just focus on the exercise.”

Ed rolled his shoulders, looking at the gates with deep-rooted distaste mixed with a determination to beat them. He thought again of the beautiful pieces from his dream of the temple, each carved with the symbol for ‘air’. He thought of Scar and Khalid, two brothers learning how to master their element just like Al and Ed had done in the past. Years, a whole culture and a bloody war separated them, but they weren’t so different deep down. 

_We are different beads, but we all belong to the same thread._

This was Khalid’s metaphor, the one that the airbender monks had taught him, and it had never meant much to him. He preferred to think of it as having the same soul but different bodies and minds than his previous incarnations. For a strange moment he thought he could almost feel that soul, or maybe just the whatever that made him special and allowed him to bend all the elements, vibrate from somewhere deep inside of him. It was ancient and powerful and had belonged to countless Avatars before him.

“Ready?” said Scar, and Ed nodded.

_I have done it before and there’s no reason I can’t do it again._

He ran toward the gates. When he reached them, they weren’t rough wooden boards nailed together without finesse anymore, but looked smooth and polished. He was at the Southern Air Temple again, and he wasn’t really Khalid but he wasn’t quite Ed either. He was--

\-- _a leaf in the wind._ He was spinning on himself, moving air as he drew circles with his arms. He was standing at the top of a snowy mountain peak, looking down on a frozen valley. He was raising walls of earth on both sides of himself, hurling fire at groups of soldiers. He was _levitating_ , floating at the center of a whirlpool of earth, fire, water and air.

Abruptly he was back in the now and then, an inch from getting rammed into by one of the gates, but he stepped back and avoided it, then stepped to the side to dodge another one. The gates had come to mean pain and frustration to him despite how hard he’d worked at getting it right, but now he felt strangely lazy, almost unconcerned by the exercise. It felt like his body knew how to move without any input from his brain and it was the most relaxed he’d been in a very long time. When he stepped down the platform on the other side the first thing he saw was Scar, looking at him with a strange expression on his face. Then Al collided into his side, shouting in his ear, “You did it, brother!”

“Ow, Al, careful! I have bruises over bruises because of those damn gates.”

Al laughed but stepped away, patting him more gently on the shoulder. “How did you do it? What changed?”

Ed looked in direction of Scar. “I remembered how to let go,” he said.

Scar’s eyes widened briefly before he got control of his expression again. He seemed about to say something, but the back door of the house opened and Hawkeye came out. 

“I heard shouting,” she said. “Did anything happen?”

“Ed managed the exercise,” Al explained excitedly. “He made it through the gates without touching them.”

Hawkeye’s mouth formed the hint of an approving smile. “Congratulations, Edward. I’ll inform the colonel; he’ll be pleased to know that you’re making good progress.”

Ed’s face felt warm; everyone making such a big deal out of him succeeding at a basic exercise that airbenders did when they were eight was getting really embarrassing. 

“You don’t have to update the colonel about every little thing,” he said.

“Actually, I do. He asked me to.”

She turned around and went back into the house. Scar gave Ed an appraising look, then said in his sternest voice, “This is just the beginning, though.”

“I know, I know.”

“We haven’t made an airbender out of you yet.”

But he was on the path, now, and even though Scar wasn’t saying it Ed heard it behind his words anyway. He thought again about the flashes he’d seen during the exercise. They were of the other Avatars, he knew for sure, even though the knowledge of who he’d been in each of those memories was already fading from his conscious mind. Being the Avatar was about more than healing Al--the thought made Ed feel guilty, but he couldn’t entirely suppress it. He’d glimpsed into the myriads of lives he’d lived before and what he’d accomplished, and it was giving him vertigo. To stop thinking about it Ed made himself focus on Al, who was still hanging from his shoulder.

“Hey, Al,” he said, nudging his brother in the ribs.

“Yeah?”

“Only one element to go.”

Al’s smile didn’t exactly fade, but it turned melancholic. “You’ll be the greatest Avatar ever,” he said. “I just know it.”

Ed’s heart clenched at his brother’s assurance of faith. Great Avatars belonged to another age; if Ed managed to heal his brother and not get caught by the government to be turned into a weapon, he’d count himself lucky. But Al believed in him, and he wasn’t the only one--Colonel Mustang, Lieutenant Hawkeye also did, and, strangest of all, it looked like Scar was getting there too. 

When Scar called for him, Ed went knowing that he was taking the next step on the Avatar’s path.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the end of this particular fic, but not of the larger story. Thank you to the old readers who have stuck with me and to the new readers who have just discovered this 'verse! I'll keep doing my best, even if it takes some time.


End file.
